CHRISTIANITY 

AND THE 

MODERN MIND 

SAMUEL MCCOMB 




Class P ft 1 ' 
Book 44 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



Christianity and the Modern Mind 



CHRISTIANITY AND THE 
MODERN MIND 



BY 



SAMUEL McCOMB 

co-author of "religion and medicine" and 
"the christian religion as a healing power"; 
author of "the making of the english bible " 




NEW YORK 
DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY 
1910 



*& 



Copyright, 1910, by 
DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY 



Pablished, December, 1910 



£ CU278355 



k 



TO 

MY WIFE 

I DEDICATE THIS BOOK 



PREFATORY NOTE 

The substance of a portion of this book 
has already appeared in print — Chapters I 
and III in the Contemporary Review, Chap- 
ter VI in the Century Magazine, Chapters 
VIII and IX in the London Quarterly 
Review. All this material has been carefully 
revised and in part rewritten for the present 
volume. The remainder of the book appears 
now for the first time. 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

Introduction 
I The Intellect in Religion . . 1 
II What We Know About Jesus Christ 36 

III What is the Christian Religion? . 90 

IV Religion and Miracle . . .119 

V The Problem op Suffering in the 

Light of Christianity . . . 148 

VI The New Belief in Prayer . .170 

VII Prayer : Difficulties and Methods 195 

VIII Immortality and Science . . . 223 

IX Immortality and Human Nature . 253 

X Religion in Modern Society . .281 

XI The New Conception of Missions . 319 

Index 



INTRODUCTION 

It is a hard task for any man to estimate the 
spiritual tendencies of his own generation. 
There are so many currents and cross cur- 
rents, and he himself is so deeply affected by 
them, that he cannot get a detached and dis- 
passionate view, and hence is liable to mis- 
take a mere temporary eddy for a strong and 
steady movement. Still he can learn some- 
thing of the course of things, by noting the 
subjects which interest the circles to which 
he belongs, and by conference with persons of 
different grades of culture with whom he may 
be brought into contact. Judging in this way, 
I venture to believe that we are about to wit- 
ness a great revival of interest in the spir- 
itual and ideal aspects of life, and more es- 
pecially in religion as a shaping, guiding, 
reconciling force in the individual and in 
society. One phenomenon of our time is 

ix 



INTRODUCTION 

especially striking. It is the spectacle of 
thousands of persons who want to believe 
but can find no help in the traditions of the 
churches. All their instincts are on the side 
of religion, yet the religion of their youth 
seems powerless to cope with their maturer 
experiences. They believe that there is a 
great secret in religion, a secret of unspeak- 
able blessedness, of victory over the discour- 
agements and sorrows which the world in- 
flicts on them; but it has escaped them and 
they would fain find it. They long to be 
pure, to have inward peace and unity. They 
long for redemption from slavery to the 
lower things of the world, for entrance into 
a higher order of existence. They are grop- 
ing for some hand that will lead them out of 
darkness into light. Too often these persons 
secede from the great historic churches, 
which seem to them to be preoccupied with 
other affairs and to be lacking in spiritual 
warmth and effectiveness. No doubt, to 
some extent this unsettlement is owing to 

x 



INTRODUCTION 

supposed injuries inflicted on traditional re- 
ligion by modern criticism and natural sci- 
ence. Intelligent laymen know, in a vague 
way, that criticism has shaken the very foun- 
dations of traditional teaching about the 
Bible; that the scientific conception of the 
world has revolutionized beliefs supposed to 
be essential to religion; that the great doc- 
trines of God, of Christ, of sin, and of immor- 
tality are the subject of strenuous debate. 
And they ask earnestly — Allowing for every- 
thing that modern knowledge can take from 
us, what is left as a solid basis for faith when 
science and criticism have done their worst 
or their best? Can we still pray and believe 
and hope without at the same time forfeiting 
our right to exercise rational thought? If 
religion is not to evaporate into superstition 
for the unthinking, some attempt must be 
made to answer these questions. These pages 
are meant to be a contribution in this direc- 
tion. Emphasis is laid on results rather than 
on the methods by which the results are won, 

xi 



INTRODUCTION 

partly because of the limitations of space, and 
partly because any real insight into the proc- 
esses can be gained only by long discipline 
and training. Here my function, if humble, 
is none the less honourable. It is that of a 
kind of theological middleman, who would 
mediate to thoughtful but non-academic per- 
sons the main conclusions about the origin 
and meaning of the Christian religion, to 
which the general body of scholars have come 
or are coming. Hence my aim is not critical, 
but positive and constructive. There are 
signs that mere criticism is losing its interest 
for thoughtful minds within the Church. 
This has come about partly because criticism 
has largely done its work — a great and noble 
and necessary work — and partly because the 
human soul cannot permanently live by criti- 
cism alone, but ever seeks to go beyond it in 
search of something to which criticism is a 
mere preliminary. Hence there is a craving 
to-day for a richer, a more positive expo- 
sition of the great truths of Christianity than 

xn 



INTRODUCTION 

has been the custom for some time ; and, be- 
cause the Church does not always satisfy this 
desire, many are leaving its fellowship. But 
perhaps the most serious aspect of the pres- 
ent situation is the belief of many that the 
Church is not only intellectually but spiritu- 
ally bankrupt, that she can bring no healing 
or reconciling word to the distracted souls of 
men. The modern man will accept no 
Church, however venerable its pedigree, 
however lofty its pretensions, if it cannot 
justify its existence by contributing to life. 
In truth, he does not know what to do with 
ideas that cannot be translated into some kind 
of experience. The dogmas of the Church, 
however apparently bound up through long 
association with the very existence of reli- 
gion, cease to interest him unless they can 
be shown to have a meaning for life. We 
may or may not deplore this tendency. 
Whether we do so or not, we must relate our- 
selves to it. But should we deplore it? Was 
not Christianity a life before it became a 

xiii 



INTRODUCTION 

creed? Must not its most convincing evi- 
dence be found in its effects, in what it ac- 
tually can do? In the Golden Age of Chris- 
tian faith, the age of apostles and martyrs, 
religion seemed to men to be above all things, 
" power, " power to recreate the soul, to 
heal the wounds of body and of mind, to lift 
the sinner and the outcast into the freedom 
of the children of God. In these pages I have 
tried to show how our belief in God, in Jesus 
Christ, in a life beyond the grave, has a mean- 
ing for us here and now and bears vitally 
upon our earthly fate. The crowning need 
of the hour is for men who will do for reli- 
gious truth what Socrates did for philosophy 
— -bring it down from the clouds and make 
it minister to the commonplace needs of plain 
men and women. Martineau has somewhere 
said that we require the constraint of the 
loftiest motives in order to discharge the 
most humdrum duties; so I believe only God 
himself can wipe away our tears and ease us 
of the burdens of our lot and lift us above 

xiv 



INTRODUCTION 

the sordid miseries with which we are sur- 
rounded. It is through this gate that the re- 
ligion of Jesus Christ seems likely to enter 
anew the soul of our age and free men from 
the shackles which have too long bound them. 
No man need despair of the age. Con- 
stantly do we hear of new ' ' movements \ ' ; 
and movement is a sign of life. Pragmatism, 
which aims at conceiving truth in terms of 
life; the great Modernist movement within 
the Church of Kome, driven for the moment 
underground, but destined to reappear with 
renewed vigour; the newer Biblical Scholar- 
ship, which seeks to pierce beneath the tran- 
sitory to the permanent elements in revela- 
tion; the Psychical Eesearch movement, 
which would not only believe but know that 
man is heir to immortality ; the rise of Spir- 
itual Healing in its various forms, now sane, 
rational, and grounded on historic Christian- 
ity, and, again, insane, irrational, and di- 
vorced from the main stream of Christian 
tradition; Socialism, with its passion for 

XV 



INTRODUCTION 

men, its longing for a new earth; the new 
Evangelism, with its passion for men in their 
spiritual and eternal relations and its new- 
found emphasis on the ethical side of reli- 
gion — all these stirrings of the human spirit 
testify that God is still in the world and that 
many are feeling His high visitation. 



xvi 



CHAPTER I 

THE INTELLECT IN KELIGI0N 

The sad fate which overtakes words is no- 
where more painfully illustrated than in the 
history of the word " dogma." It was orig- 
inally used in the Greek and Eoman philo- 
sophic schools to express a personal convic- 
tion of an individual thinker, not only about 
purely intellectual problems, but also about 
ethical principles and motives to conduct. 
Dogma was then a man's deepest belief. 
Gradually, however, it lost this personal ref- 
erence and was applied to propositions sup- 
posed to be universally valid and eternally 
true. It was this meaning that the word 
took on in the history of Christian theology. 
Dogma was a formulated statement of Divine 
truth supernaturally revealed and imposed 
by ecclesiastical authority. To-day we live 
in a world which has thrown off the bonds 



THE MODERN MIND 

of authority, and with them all dogmas, 
whether religious, philosophical, political, or 
social. The adjectives with which the word 
usually keeps company are significant of the 
popular feeling. Dogmas are " dead or 
dying." They are " obsolete or out- worn." 
They belong to a u pre-critical " stage of 
thought. " Away with dogma! " cries the 
pulpit, echoed by the pew. " Give us the 
simple Gospel of Jesus in its purity and 
freshness, uncontaminated by theological 
theories that only darken and repel ! " And 
the conception here rudely and crudely enun- 
ciated has found powerful expression and 
splendid exposition at the hands of a German 
school that has much to say of the Gospel, 
while it puts dogma under the ban. It is a 
most depressing reflection that two of the 
finest prophetic spirits of the nineteenth cen- 
tury arrived at diametrically opposite con- 
clusions in the matter under discussion. 
Martineau preached an undogmatic Christian- 
ity, a spiritualised and Christianised theism. 

% 



THE INTELLECT IN RELIGION 

Newman knew no time when religion pre- 
sented itself to him in any guise save that 
of dogma. The former charged the latter 
with want of immediateness of religious 
vision, with failure to pierce to the primitive 
roots of faith, where, apart from any ob- 
structing media, the Divine and human min- 
gle. The Catholic, on the other hand, could 
scarce detect in the face of the Unitarian 
even a fugitive gleam of Christian light. 
Clearly, it is an urgent task to endeavour to 
clear up the relations of dogma and religion, 
to define the rights and value of theology for 
the Church and the individual, and to investi- 
gate whether indeed it is, as some imagine, 
not a living branch of the tree of knowledge, 
but a dead excrescence and, therefore, of no 
permanent value for the spiritual life of 
humanity. 

What, then, is dogma in the genuine sense? 
It is not merely identical with truth which 
claims to be believed, for in this sense it is 

a 



THE MODERN MIND 

clear that all thinking men, whether they call 
themselves dogmatists or anti-dogmatists, 
have dogmas. Emerson and Carlyle are 
theologically most undogmatic; yet the calm 
and serene optimism of the one, the troubled 
and turbulent pessimism of the other, rest on 
dogma backed up by the sternest sanctions. 
But these great modern preachers insist that 
their dogmas are verifiable in experience, that 
every man can see their proof writ large in 
history and life; whereas, by theology, we 
are often asked to yield a blind assent 
to principles which are not open to veri- 
fication and which appeal for their sanc- 
tion to ecclesiastical decisions. An analysis 
of the notion of dogma will show that it con- 
tains three elements. In the first place, there 
is the spiritual experience out of which the 
dogma arises. This experience is the mys- 
tical soul of all religion and is possible only 
through a revelation of God in the soul. The 
prophet is overwhelmed by the vision of God. 
His soul is stirred to its depths and he must 

4 



THE INTELLECT IN RELIGION 

tell to others the things he has seen and 
heard. Here we have the second factor in 
the process. He must express what he has 
experienced in the intellectual forms of his 
age and place. Hence dogma can lay no claim 
to infallibility, because it is not the absolute 
and unadulterated reality. Eather is it a 
reality refracted and coloured by the hu- 
man media of reflection, reason, elaboration, 
through which it passes. Eeligious intui- 
tion grasps truth as a concrete whole. Dog- 
matic reflection analyses it, dissects it into 
its component parts, and seeks to show the 
links of connection, the inner consistency that 
binds them into unity. Now in this process 
of reflection a certain element is lost — the 
infinitude in which the experience of faith 
lives, moves, and has its being. The logical 
forms of the understanding break up this 
infinitude and limit it, giving us only a num- 
ber of abstractions which are distinct, the 
one from the other. Hence, from the nature 
of the case, dogma is imperfect, fragmentary, 

5 



THE MODERN MIND 

and relative. Religious intuition becomes 
dim, distorted, takes on the hues of feeling 
and thinking of the inescapable moral con- 
sciousness of a given period. Hence it is 
that in each age the moulds in which Divine 
truth has been run, in Paul's words, " the 
earthly vessels which bear the heavenly treas- 
ure, " must be broken, that new ones may 
be formed more worthy of its imperishable 
worth. 

The third element in the notion of dogma 
is that of authority. There is a widespread 
idea that religious truth differs from all 
other kinds of truth in that it appeals for 
its credentials, not to reason taken in its 
general philosophical sense, but to authority. 
The Roman Catholic appeals to the Church; 
the High Anglican to the Bible as interpreted 
by the primitive Church; the Evangelical to 
the ipsissima verba of the sacred writings. 
These theories at bottom are, paradoxical as 
it may seem, sceptical on the one hand of 
the inherent sovereignty and convincing en- 

6 



THE INTELLECT IN RELIGION 

ergy of Divine truth, and on the other of 
the moral reason of man. And yet theology 
must appeal to reason, taken, as has been 
intimated, not in the narrow sense of the 
discursive understanding, but as expressing 
the totality of man's spiritual powers. 
" For," says Bishop Butler, " reason is in- 
deed the only faculty we have wherewith to 
judge concerning anything, even religion it- 
self." 

But in thus robbing dogmas of all external 
supports, of all claims to infallibility, do we 
therefore deprive it of authority? By no 
means. It has not, indeed, the authority of 
a scientific generalisation or of a proposition 
of Euclid, which has but to be studied and 
grasped to gain the consent of all rational 
beings. To crave for such a coercive func- 
tion in religion is the last infirmity of the 
theological mind. For it is only in the 
lower and less important spheres of truth 
that demonstrative certainty is gained; the 
higher we go the more our certainty 

7 



THE MODERN MIND 

depends on our apprehension of our moral 
and spiritual needs and on our attitude to- 
wards the objects of faith. Genuine dogma, 
then, is clothed in moral certainty. Its ap- 
peal is ethical. Its word is — " He that is 
of the truth heareth My voice." The Divine 
revelation, the unveiling of God's will and 
purpose, is not something fixed in strict and 
rigid outline, to be imposed on the intellect 
by ecclesiastical or any other authority. 
It is a living process, whose grandest prod- 
ucts may be found in Holy Scripture, a proc- 
ess which for us culminates in the person and 
work of Christ, who offers Himself to each 
succeeding age for fresh interpretation, for 
the unfolding of the unsearchable riches of 
His Spirit. 

But, it may be said, in thus depriving 
dogma of all authority from without and sim- 
ply leaving it alone with the individual con- 
sciousness, are you not cutting religion 
loose from its moorings and sending it adrift 
on a boundless sea of speculation, doubt, and 

8 



THE INTELLECT IN RELIGION 

uncertainty? Is there no criterion, no court 
of appeal by which this or that doctrine can 
have its claims tested, approved, or disap- 
proved? If there be no such tribunal, scep- 
ticism is as justifiable as faith, and religion 
resolves itself into a play of subjective indi- 
vidualistic fancies which have no foundation 
in reality. All past attempts to discover such 
a standard have in our age utterly broken 
down. For centuries men believed that the 
Church was an infallible authority, but at 
the Eeformation the conscience of Europe 
broke with this theory. In its place the Bible 
was exalted as the only infallible rule of faith 
and practice, but the doctrine was never log- 
ically realised; for, when it was discovered 
that there was no uniform understanding of 
the Biblical contents, creeds and confessions 
were formulated which as standards of dog- 
matic truth took the place of Scripture. And 
these creeds and confessions in many of their 
details imply a theory of revelation no longer 
held by Christian divines. In the eighteenth 

9 



THE MODERN MIND 

century the ultimate criterion of doctrine was 
found in reason of the logical understanding. 
In the hands of Toland, Tindal, Collins, and 
their followers, Christianity was not so much 
explained as explained away. It became a 
mere republication of what was as old as cre- 
ation. The question, then, before the Church 
to-day is : Where shall we find a genuine doc- 
trinal standard? The problem, if frankly 
faced, can admit of one solution only. It is 
in the Christian consciousness of the indi- 
vidual and of the age that the court of ap- 
peal is to be found. In other words, the ul- 
timate standard is the religious consciousness 
in which all men have a share, enlightened, 
moulded, penetrated, and shaped by the 
teaching of Christ in the Gospels, in the his- 
tory of the Church, and in the illuminating 
influence of His Spirit. Each age has its own 
vision of Christ. In the ultimate analysis 
it is by this vision that all things must be 
tried. It represents the best conclusions of 
the age as to the contents of the Bible, the 

10 



THE INTELLECT IN RELIGION 

meaning of the world and of life ; and, while 
its decisions are not final in the sense that 
posterity may not advance beyond them, they 
are for us the measure of our apprehension 
of the truth. Christ grows in the individual 
soul. He also grows in the soul of an age. 
Centuries, as they pass, unfold in ever- 
increasing richness the ideal significance of 
His person. " Our ideal," as Emerson says, 
" is a flying one. ' ' The goal ever recedes as 
we advance. Before His bar all dogmas must 
be arraigned. Whatever bears His criticism 
justifies its right to be. Whatever shrinks 
from before His eye, though it has grown 
old in the service of human thought, is 
doomed to death. 

The great ideal systems which fascinated 
earlier ages have but little attraction for us 
to-day. Our age is nothing if not pragmatic, 
and it asks of an alleged truth — What can it 
do? Of what use is it for human life? 
" Truth," says Mr. F. C. S. Schiller, " which 
will not or cannot submit to verification is 

11 



THE MODERN MIND 

not yet truth at all. Its truth is at best po- 
tential. Its meaning is null or unintelligible, 
or at most, conjectural, or dependent on an 
unfulfilled condition. To become really true 
it has to be tested by being applied. . . . 
Hence all real truths must have shown them- 
selves to be useful ; they must have been ap- 
plied to some problem of actual knowing, by 
usefulness in which they were tested and 
verified." 1 Now Christianity asks to be 
tested by its working. Any element in Chris- 
tian theology which cannot be verified does 
not belong to the essence of the religion. 
How, then, does it fare with the idea of the 
Incarnation, God's unique revelation of His 
character in Christ? Does not this doctrine 
stand the pragmatic test and prove itself 
truth by the mighty things it has achieved in 
history? It is not too much to say that it 
has wrought a trans-valuation in the moral 
and spiritual realm. Wherever it has been 
believed man has become a new being to 

1 Studies in Humanism, p. 8. 
12 



THE INTELLECT IN RELIGION 

himself. The outcast, the slave, the criminal, 
the poverty-stricken, all have felt its up- 
lifting influence. The most enduring phil- 
anthropies have sprung from a belief 
in the Divine philanthropy revealed in 
Christ. 

The way is now clear for the discussion of 
our second question: What is the Eelation 
of Theology to Eeligion? The confounding 
of one with the other has been a fruitful 
source of mischief during the entire history 
of the Church. The holy intuitions of reli- 
gion have, as it were, overleaped their limits 
and covered with their authority dogmas born 
of an undisciplined imagination or of an 
overweening intellectualism. We are suffer- 
ing to-day from a reaction against this tend- 
ency. A young and able German divine has 
recently said that Jesus came " to save us 
from the theologians." * There is a sense in 
which this is true ; but there is another sense 

1 Wernle: Beginnings of Christianity. 
13 



THE MODERN MIND 

in which, it appears to be only a barren para- 
dox. Jesus saves us from one type of the- 
ology by substituting for it a loftier and more 
adequate type. His method is not the method 
of the schools. All His teaching as to God 
and man and human destiny is not a con- 
glomerate of independent maxims, but is 
based on great organising ideas. Dr. Har- 
nack, who is prone to regard the history of 
theology as a kind of progressive disease in 
the Church, is yet compelled to admit that 
" the Gospel is doctrine in so far as it pro- 
claims the reality of God as Father." But 
how can we be in earnest with the idea of 
the Divine Fatherhood if we cut it off from 
everything that makes it intelligible and 
credible? The Gospel, it is true, says to 
every man, ' ' You can claim God as your Fa- 
ther. ' ' But if this saying should exhaust its 
content, would not the message hang in the 
air an alien element intruded into a world 
that knows it not? The Fatherhood of God — 
this is the kernel of Christ's message; and 

14 



THE INTELLECT IN RELIGION 

truly many a pious soul may take the truth 
home to itself without fully realising all that 
lies folded within it, may feel the impact of 
the Divine grace and love without knowing 
any need to raise in answer the problems 
arising out of such a wonderful experience. 
But the spirit awakened to self-reflection 
cannot but realise that, unless the message 
is to work only in the region of emotion and 
fantasy, and never pour its vital currents 
into all the channels of the spiritual life, 
questions emerge that will not be silenced. 
You say " God is Father "; but I live in a 
world which in moments of despair I am 
tempted to call blind and brutal. How does 
God stand related to this world? I must 
bring into relation the facts of science and 
knowledge with the dictates of my religious 
consciousness. The truth is that, whether 
he wills or no, every man who is conscious 
of a religious feeling is a theologian. What 
Professor Paulsen says of Philosophy is 
equally valid here : * i Philosophy is not a 

15 



THE MODERN MIND 

matter which we may or may not have. In 
a certain sense, every man who raises him- 
self above the brutishness of the animal life 
has a philosophy. The only question is, 
What kind of philosophy has he? Is it one 
rudely put together out of some accidental 
fragments of knowledge and disjointed no- 
tions, or is it one thought out and based on 
a full-orbed view of reality? " x 

Whence, then, the popular outcry against 
dogma; the formula with which our time is 
so familiar, — ' ' Back to Christ ! ' ', the demand 
to go behind creeds and theological systems 
to the informal teaching of the Sermon on 
the Mount or the Parable of the Prodigal 
Son? It is here that the popular conscious- 
ness has a relative justification. As we have 
said, dogma is not religion. Theology is not 
faith. " Not the astronomical system, " 
says Schleiermacher, " but the glance di- 
rected to the highest heaven is the most 
appropriate symbol of religious contempla- 

1 Einleitung in die Philosophic 

16 



THE INTELLECT IN RELIGION 

tion." To the ordinary mind, dogma seems 
hard, rigid, stationary, whereas it is really 
something fluid, vital, and inextricably in- 
volved in the deepest elements of the reli- 
gious consciousness. And if one form of 
theological reflection be found unworthy of 
the great moments of Christian experience, 
it does not follow that a nobler and more spir- 
itual one may not be found, or that into the 
old form a new content may not be poured. 
It would be easy to show that there 
is not a single article of the Apostles ' 
Creed which has for the modern Chris- 
tian the meaning it had when originally 
formulated; and it may be doubted whether 
any two persons interpret the Creed in ex- 
actly the same way. " I see," says Auguste 
Sabatier, " a large assembly gathered in 
one of our churches for worship. In this as- 
sembly some are poor old women, very ig- 
norant, and some superstitious; some men 
of middle class, possessing some tincture of 
literature; some are wise men and philoso- 

17 



THE MODERN MIND 

pliers who have meditated on Kant and 
Hegel, and even professors of theology who 
are penetrated to the marrow with the spirit 
of criticism. All of these bow down their 
hearts and worship; all speak the same 
tongue, learned in childhood; all repeat with 
heart and lip, * I believe in God the Father 
Almighty/ Is there on earth a sight more 
touching or anything nearer to Heaven? . . . 
But do you suppose that the word God 
when it is pronounced by all those lips sum- 
mons up the same image to each one of those 
minds? And yet for all of them the dogma 
of God subsists, and it is because it is still 
living that it lends itself to so many inter- 
pretations. But observe that it is living only 
because it serves as the expression of a piety 
felt by all these believers and common to 
them all." 1 

The notion that we can have a religion 
without a theology implies a false concep- 
tion of spiritual activity. The inner life is 

x The Vitality of Christian Dogmas, pp. 26 seq. 

18 



THE INTELLECT IN RELIGION 

a unity, and all its elements work together 
in action and reaction. Without some kind 
of idea, our practical religious life would 
soon cease to have any meaning. It is true 
that great ideas of religion are not clear-cut 
and sharply defined, but vague and sym- 
bolical! It is, however, these vague and 
symbolical ideas that are the most powerful 
levers of the human will and the greatest 
stimulus to human emotion. 

Still further, as history shows, dogma has 
subserved a valuable purpose in protecting 
the essence of religion. E. H. Hutton, speak- 
ing of Newman's Avians of the Fourth 
Century, laments the fact that the great 
Cardinal " thought of dogma a little too 
much as the essence instead of as the mere 
protective covering of revelation. The sub- 
stance of revelation is the character of God; 
and dogma is only necessary to those whose 
minds cannot enter into this marvellous rev- 
elation of the character of God and of his 
love for man, without asking a hundred 

19 



THE MODERN MIND 

questions to which in our present state only 
very imperfect and unsatisfactory answers 
can be given — answers that only show how 
much greater are the difficulties of the semi- 
sceptics than of the hearty believers and do 
not show that Christian faith is itself free 
from serious difficulty. ' ' 1 Thus does it come 
about that while faith creates theology, 
theology, in turn, awakens and propagates 
faith. Moreover, with the exercise of reason 
in religion, there comes a certain largeness 
and balance of view that preserves the mind 
from the fanaticism that so greatly disfig- 
ures the popular faith, and from the shal- 
lowness which is the curse of so much mod- 
ern philanthropy. Many of the quasi-philo- 
sophical and irrational cults and associations 
that are attracting adherents from the his- 
torical Christian Churches would never have 
gained a vogue had the Christian laity been 
encouraged to think freely and intelligently 
about the problems of faith. If this genera- 
1 Cardinal Newman, p. 30. 
20 



THE INTELLECT IN RELIGION 

tion is to be saved, on the one hand from 
impotence and despair in face of the great 
intellectual and social questions clamouring 
for an answer, and on the other hand from 
fanaticism and uncritical acceptance of doc- 
trines created by an overheated and unregu- 
lated enthusiasm, it can only be by a theol- 
ogy large, rich, generously human, which, 
while not breaking violently with the past, 
will yet be loyal to the claims and needs of 
the present. 

What, now, of the future of theology? For 
the traditionalist and the agnostic alike, 
there is none. To the mind of the former 
theology is a fixed quantity, eternally un- 
changeable, its existence is a death in life; 
in the view of the latter it is slowly but 
surely advancing to the grave dug to receive 
it. Neither position will stand the test of 
criticism. However Divine the content of 
theology may be, as a science it is earthly, 
and makes advances like all earthly forms of 

21 



THE MODERN MIND 

knowledge, from the less to the more ade- 
quate conceptions and principles. Ideas are 
like seeds : they germinate in the intellectual 
soil of an age; gather nutriment from all 
sides; grow, and in growing, are trans- 
formed. Religious persons are at present 
much exercised over what claims to be a 
new theology. The term, strictly taken, is 
inept and irrelevant. The best religious 
thinking of the past, as of any given period, 
is new, in the sense that a tree is new at any 
moment of its growth; it is old, in the 
sense that the tree preserves through all its 
changes a conformity to the type given in 
its earlier germ. Each age must have its 
own theology: that is, its reasoned system 
of beliefs expressed in terms of its own con- 
sciousness. It must win the truth for itself, 
and not receive it merely ready-made from 
the hands of past generations. The facul- 
ties by which religious doctrine is estab- 
lished grow in fineness, in intensity, and in 
power. With the growth of intellect, of holi- 



THE INTELLECT IN RELIGION 

ness, of purity and clearness of vision, of an 
experience akin to that of Christ, there comes 
an ever-increasing insight into the meaning 
of Divine things, which in turn demands 
fresh doctrinal forms within which the spir- 
itual life may feel itself at home. " A new 
experience," says Professor G. W. Knox, 
" may produce a new theology." 1 It has 
been so all through the Christian past. The- 
ology has not, like the Bourbons, learned 
nothing and forgotten nothing: nay, it has 
been through forgetting that she has learned. 
Genesis has been taken from us as a scien- 
tific school-book, to be given back to us as 
a prophetic scroll exhibiting not the transi- 
tory face but the Divine meaning of nature. 
The dread phantoms that haunted the imag- 
ination of an Augustine or a Dante, as they 
speculated on the fate of unbaptised infants, 
have vanished before the more Christ-like 
thought of a later age. The strange fantas- 
tic fictions that theologians have woven 

1 The Gospel of Jesus, the Son of God, p. 23. 



THE MODERN MIND 

around even the Cross of Calvary — such a 
notion, for example, as ruled the Church's 
thought for seven centuries, that, in dying, 
Christ was to play a trick upon the devil, 
baiting the hook of His Divine nature with 
His humanity, and thus subjugating him by 
a clever stratagem — excite a repulsion of 
mind that is a measure of the distance we 
have travelled in the things of religion. And 
to-day such doctrines as the inspiration and 
authority of the Bible, the Fall of Man, and 
Original Sin, are calling aloud for recon- 
struction in view of the assured results of 
historical criticism and the science of an- 
thropology. The data with which theology 
is concerned are the facts of the spiritual 
life as they are disclosed in history and in 
the Christian consciousness of to-day. But, 
as our knowledge of history and of the spir- 
itual life is continually growing, it follows 
that the rational interpretation of this 
knowledge must also grow. On the other 
hand, any attempt to break violently with 



THE INTELLECT IN RELIGION 

the past and to overthrow the great central 
convictions which sustain Christian faith is 
doomed to failure. After all, there is, as 
Matthew Arnold used to say, a stream of 
right reason in the world, and only by keep- 
ing in this stream is a man likely to serve 
the cause of truth and the spiritual interests 
of his own generation. Not by creating new 
dogmas, then, but by reinterpreting old ones 
in the light of a fresher experience, will 
the religious thinker meet the demands of 
the modern situation. Christian men of 
all ages are thus bound together not in 
the bonds of a dead uniformity, but in the 
unity of a common life and a common 
inspiration. 

But the agnostic, by a curious myope, sees 
in every advance of religious thought a sign 
of disintegration, decay, and speedy death. 
All that we know of what lies behind the 
inner and outer worlds of appearance is the 
Unknowable; and we are bidden to bow be- 
fore this caput mortiwm, this residuary 

25 



THE MODERN MIND 

phantom of a barren dialect, as though it 
were the supreme reality. Now that the 
metaphysician has shown that agnosticism 
cannot even be stated without involving a con- 
tradiction in thought, the way is open to the 
theologian to remove the mask that hides 
from us the face of the living God and re- 
veal Him as the Father of spirits, the eter- 
nal Source of energy from Whom come and 
in "Whom are those finite, energising centres 
which we call human souls. For one thing, 
even agnosticism no longer confounds mind 
with non-human nature and makes man like 
a plant or an animal, a product of what is 
called in the narrower sense the cosmic 
process. Man is no longer robbed of all 
ethical value and explained solely in terms 
of animalism. His moral nature is a posses- 
sion which, we are beginning to realise, 
is of eternal worth in a universe otherwise 
transitory. Be the links that bind him to 
the lower creation however many and subtle, 
there is a growing consciousness that within 

26 



THE INTELLECT IN RELIGION 

him there is an element in nature that may 
well claim affinity with the Divine. As a 
sentient being he seems the sport and play 
of cosmic forces; but as a being who alone 
can hear the categorical imperative of con- 
science, can lend, as Goethe says, perma- 
nence to the moment, can hearken to the 
whisper of immortal hopes, he is where the- 
ology has always placed him — at the centre 
of the universe. Thus science leads us 
to the threshold of religion and leaves us 
there. 

The second cheering consideration for the 
theologian is that materialism, which threat- 
ened to swamp the spiritual life of man a 
generation ago is now everywhere discred- 
ited. Whatever theory of things may be 
true, no educated man to-day can accept 
the materialistic doctrine. Even Professor 
Haeckel, who conceives of the world as a 
huge mechanism in which man is set as a 
kind of puppet moved by mechanical wires, 
at the end of his book on the World Eiddles 

n 



THE MODERN MIND 

erects an altar to Truth, Goodness, and 
Beauty, which in unity will constitute the 
Deity of the future. Why, in a world where 
freedom is an illusion and all our spiritual 
activities are the functions of the central 
nervous system, Truth, Goodness, and 
Beauty must constitute the goal of all our 
efforts, Professor Haeckel does not explain. 
This writer is not, as he is careful to point 
out, a materialist, but a monist. Neverthe- 
less, his monism is such as to leave matter 
and energy victorious. 

Thirdly, the theory of evolution, which 
was at first considered both by agnostic and 
believer to be the foe of religion, has turned 
out to be its friend. For criticism has made 
it increasingly clear that, while all animals 
are modified descendants of a more simple 
type, and that probably every form of life 
originally sprang from some monad germ, 
it remains true that natural selection and the 
survival of the fittest cannot bear the strain 
put upon them and do not account for all 

28 



THE INTELLECT IN RELIGION 

that is implied in the evolutionary process. 
Nay, more, the application of the evolution- 
ary principle in theology has been productive 
of the richest results. Modern divinity is 
not an analysis and co-ordination of texts 
merely. It is above all concerned with doc- 
trines as vital growths originating in simple 
and informal thoughts of the early centu- 
ries, and, under the influence of the general 
intellectual life of the world, unfolding in 
ever-augmenting richness and complexity 
until their full fruit and flower are manifest 
in the higher religious conceptions of the 
modern Church. 

Finally, historical criticism, which has 
done so much to purge theology of accidental 
accretions, has also contributed very mate- 
rially to its substance and strength. It used 
to be said that our knowledge of Jesus of 
Nazareth was so dubious that it was impos- 
sible to discover what He really did say and 
do; how much that is attributed to Him 
really occurred, and how much is the f abrica- 

29 



THE MODERN MIND 

tion of the various parties which constituted 
the primitive communities. Whether He 
ever prayed the Lord's Prayer, or de- 
livered the Sermon on the Mount, has 
been declared exceedingly doubtful. It is a 
reassuring reflection that now, after the long 
intellectual and spiritual travail of the past 
eighty years or so, this agnostic despair of 
history is no longer possible. The labours 
of such men as Schleiermacher, H. J. Holtz- 
mann, Keim, Weizsacker, Julicher, Harnack, 
and Johannes Weiss — to name only a few 
among the Germans — and Westcott, Sanday, 
Stanton, Bruce, and Burkitt among British 
writers, have not been fruitless of their due. 
Nay, even by a curious historical irony, men 
like Strauss, whose aim was to destroy 
Christianity by resolving into myth its foun- 
dations, have only succeeded in clearing 
away the rubbish which had gathered around 
these foundations and in revealing the real 
strength of the Christian position. It may 
be taken as historically certain that the tra- 

30 



THE INTELLECT IN RELIGION 

ditions of Christ's life rest ultimately upon 
two documents — the Gospel of Mark sub- 
stantially as we have it and the matter com- 
mon to Matthew and Luke not found in 
Mark. On these two pillars the Gospel his- 
tory rests. That their substance rests on the 
testimony of eye-witnesses of Christ's ca- 
reer may be accepted as one of the assured 
results of criticism. Even the most radical 
critics admit that in essence the teaching 
ascribed to Christ is really His. Still 
further, a new attitude has been taken up 
toward the miraculous element in evangelical 
tradition. It used to be thought that the 
presence of a miracle in a document was 
enough of itself to discredit the claim of the 
document to be historical. This critical rule 
rested on a notion which we now recognise to 
be fallacious, — that the early Christians 
took up our modern attitude toward miracle, 
whereas we now know that their standpoint 
was such that they might very well interpret 
as " miraculous " an event which we would 

31 



THE MODERN MIND 

describe as " extraordinary." It is now 
generally admitted that, whether we can ac- 
cept a miracle in the sense of a violation of 
the law of cause and effect or no, we cannot 
eliminate the marvellous, the extraordinary, 
from the earliest sources of the Gospel tradi- 
tion without at the same time destroying the 
historical worth of the documents as a 
whole. These positions established, conse- 
quences flow from them in the light of which 
we see theology to be, not, as some think, a 
more or less dextrous manipulation of ab- 
stract notions, but a sympathetic interpreta- 
tion of the realities of the history. They 
give us a fulcrum in the real light of human- 
ity for all our constructive endeavours. 
Christ is the inspiration of the Christian re- 
ligion and, therefore, the main source of a 
Christian theology; and the criticism of the 
nineteenth century has made the character of 
Christ as an actual presence in history a per- 
manent possession of our thought. Theol- 
ogy will become more and more humanised 

32 



THE INTELLECT IN RELIGION 

by the vision of God in the humanity of 
Christ. Men are asking to-day, not " Is 
there a God? " but, " What kind of a God 
is He who is involved in all thought and life ? 
what is the character of the Will behind the 
universe? " As we look at Jesus as He 
lives and breathes in Gospel history, we find 
God. We cannot conceive a deity whose 
character would be grander or more worthy 
of our utmost homage. Accepting this rev- 
elation, we can face the tasks of the sceptical 
intellect. We can bear the mysteries in 
which our life is set. No doubt, we have 
here rather a faith and a conviction than a 
reasoned and demonstrated conclusion. But 
truth can afford to wait. We see a light 
shining in the darkness, and as we have been 
compelled to interpret nature in terms of 
man, so our thinking seems now forced to 
interpret man in terms of Christ. The no- 
ble and ennobling thought that humanity is 
organically related to Christ, that He is the 
Archetype to which in the creative purpose 



THE MODERN MIND 

of God all men are called to be conformed, 
has sunk deep into the heart of our age and 
is already bearing fruit in the humaner 
spirit, the more gracious and generous serv- 
ice, and the wider social sympathies of all 
religious men. Hence the theology of the 
future will have a more and more social cast. 
It will bring to bear upon our social dis- 
putes and confusions the mighty solvent of 
great spiritual ideas. If Christian theology 
rests ultimately on Christ, it can no more ig- 
nore Him when He speaks of our duty to 
feed the hungry and clothe the naked and 
visit those in prison, than when He dis- 
courses on the Fatherhood of God and the 
advent of the Kingdom. Too often in the 
past theology has concerned itself .almost 
wholly with events in the supernatural or- 
der. Henceforth, without neglecting these, 
it will seek to throw light upon the prob- 
lems of this world, the bitter problems 
of poverty, sickness, crime, and social mo- 
rality. 

34 



THE INTELLECT IN RELIGION 

Some of the questions which have been here 
lightly touched upon will receive fuller dis- 
cussion and illustration in the chapters 
which follow. 



35 



CHAPTEE II 

WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT JESUS CHRIST 

There are some rarely gifted spirits, born 
mystics, who can dispense with dependence 
on the records of the past, so vivid is their 
present realisation of spiritual truths. Such 
persons feel hampered by minute inquiries 
into the genuineness of this or that element 
in the Gospels, and are inclined to concede 
everything the sceptic demands, and then 
gladly ask — " What of it? Have we not still 
God, the ideal life and immortality? No crit- 
ical questioning can prove or disprove these 
supreme realities. They are grounded in the 
depths of the soul, not communicated through 
books and parchments, or implicated in the 
events of a distant century." But even the 
mystic owes something to history, for he him- 
self has been nourished on the facts. He has 
so brooded upon the stories of the Gospels 

36 



WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT CHRIST 

that their meaning has passed into his blood, 
has become so much a part of him that the 
facts themselves seem no longer to concern 
him; they are but the dry husks from which 
the living kernel has been extracted. But this 
is the achievement only of a peculiar type of 
temperament. Normal man feels his faith re- 
enforced by the conviction that the spiritual 
realities in which he would believe are not air- 
spun dreams of enthusiasm, but the truths of 
history. Could it be shown that Jesus never 
lived, or that the tradition about Him which 
has come down to us gives a distorted view of 
His person and work, I do not say that faith 
in Divine things would perish from the earth ; 
but I am sure it would be immeasurably 
poorer, and would find itself hard-driven to 
hold up against the forces that threaten it. 
Faith, indeed, goes beyond facts; sees them 
clothed with Divine meaning and radiant in 
the splendours of the eternal world. Never- 
theless, faith finds in them its impulse, and, 
conscious of their existence, feels poised on 

37 



THE MODERN MIND 

steadier wing in its flight from earth and 
time. Were we disembodied spirits we might 
expect the objects of our faith to reveal them- 
selves in a purely ideal way ; but we are crea- 
tures of space and time, and if the invisible, 
eternal order is so to manifest itself as to take 
hold of us, it can do this only through the 
facts of the visible, temporal order in which 
our lives are set. Nor must we forget that 
Nemesis has more than once overtaken a 
purely mystical religion, with its contempt 
for the critical faculties, in the form of a 
flippant scepticism for which all religion has 
been an outgrown superstition. The im- 
portance of the question, " What do we 
know about Jesus? " is thus obvious. 
He differs from all other historical per- 
sons in that He is at once the object 
of impersonal historical knowledge, and 
of the most personal reverence and faith. As 
the object of our knowledge, he appears at a 
certain spot on this earth, and at a given mo- 
ment, lives our life, speaks words and per- 

38 



WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT CHRIST 

forms deeds that affect those about Him, in- 
augurates a great spiritual movement, and 
finally dies our death. As the object of our 
faith, He reveals God and makes us sure of 
eternal life. However much the processes of 
knowing and believing intermingle in experi- 
ence, they are to be distinguished in the inter- 
ests alike of science and religion. Neverthe- 
less, man is a spiritual unity. His knowledge 
influences his belief, and his belief in turn 
urges him to know. Our faith in Christ will 
grow stronger, more sure of itself, the nearer 
we get to Him as He actually lived on earth. 
My present purpose, therefore, is not to offer 
an interpretation of the life and work of 
Jesus Christ, but to make clear what his- 
tory has to tell us about them. 

On the threshold of our discussion we are 
met with a serious objection. It is said that 
however desirable it may be to become ac- 
quainted with Jesus Christ as a historical per- 
son, the sources of information at our dis- 
posal are so scanty, so uncertain, so contam- 

39 



THE MODERN MIND 

inated with doubtful elements, that we are 
driven to doubt whether He ever really lived, 
or, if He lived, whether we ever can know 
Him. A recent writer who undertakes to 
tell us what we know about Jesus, comes to 
the conclusion that we know very little. ' ' It 
is evident by this time," he said, " that no 
one can make anything but a vague and purely 
conjectural narrative of the life of Jesus. 
. . . How many clearly authentic utterances 
have we from Jesus? What can we rest 
upon? What, exactly, did He say? What 
did He say of Himself and His mission? 
What commandments did He lay down, or 
what ordinances did He establish? What 
new ideas, if any, did He contribute? The 
study of all these questions must be found, if 
at all, in a few pages of the synoptic Gospels. 
No one is sure or can possibly be sure of these 
answers." 1 I offer two remarks on this view 
of the life of Jesus. In the first place, it is 
impossible to believe that the long travail 
1 Dole: What We Know about Jesus, pp. 29, 9. 

40 



WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT CHRIST 

of highly equipped intellects which have been 
at work for over a century on the New Testa- 
ment records, ends in this lame and impotent 
conclusion. Were this true, the science of 
history would indeed be in a bad way. In the 
second place, to speak of Jesus Christ and 
His teaching as if these were so vague and 
uncertain that we can never know anything 
definite about them is, I venture to think, to 
ignore the most solid results of modern schol- 
arship. Before indicating in rough outline 
what scholarship has to say about our ques- 
tion, it may be well to state that the layman in 
theology does not need to undertake a course 
in Biblical criticism and theological apol- 
ogetics before he can assure himself of the 
historical reality and spiritual features of the 
Lord Jesus. As Dr. H. Weinel writes, " It is 
precisely the greatness of Jesus and the pecu- 
liarity of the tradition concerning Him, that 
every one of His brief sayings and every one 
of His parables, and all the stories concerning 
Him, display His inner character entire and 

41 



THE MODERN MIND 

display it so clearly that even the unlearned 
man may receive from it the deepest im- 
pression. . . . Let a man have heard but once 
the Parable of the Good Samaritan or of the 
Prodigal Son or of the Wicked Servant, and 
may we not believe that by means of one such 
passage he may become well acquainted with 
Jesus and entirely captivated by Him? Is 
any further experience necessary, beyond 
that of the goodness and purity, the sincerity 
and earnestness which shine forth from these 
stories?" 1 

We have but to place ourselves face to face 
with the picture of Jesus as it has been 
handed down to us in the Gospels, and put 
aside for the moment whatever elements in 
the story we are unable to assimilate, in order 
to feel that we are in touch not with fancy, 
but with fact ; and learned investigations con- 
firm the intuition of the average mind. 

The earliest source of our knowledge about 

1 Jesus or CJvrist? {Hibbert Journal Supplement, 1909, 
p. 43). 

43 



WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT CHRIST 

Jesus is the unquestioned letters of St. Paul; 
and their significance lies not so much in what 
they say as in what they imply. These docu- 
ments, penned within twenty-five years or so 
of the Crucifixion, but enshrining experiences 
of the writer which go back to within five 
years of that event and bring him into contact 
with Peter and James, the Lord's brother, as- 
sume that the details of our Lord's earthly 
life were well known to the readers, and draw 
from this knowledge motives to self-sacrifice, 
gentleness, and Christian living. If by some 
unhappy chance the Gospels had been irre- 
coverably lost, and Paul's four great letters, 
Gralatians, 1st and 2d Corinthians, and Bo- 
mans, survived, we could reconstruct, not, in- 
deed, the details of His career, but a gen- 
eral picture of His historical reality, of the 
moral and spiritual features of His character, 
some of His fundamental ideas, the fact of 
His death, and the significance attached to it 
by Himself and His disciples, and the pro- 
found impression which His personality made 

43 



THE MODERN MIND 

on the men of His time. Turn from Paul to 
the Gospels, and you pass into a different 
world, a new psychological climate. But the 
person who lives and acts there is in all essen- 
tial characteristics He in whom Paul had 
found the strength of his strength and the 
life of his life. 

Our next and main source of information is 
the four Gospels. Critical scholarship has 
spent infinite labour in scrutinising and ana- 
lysing every word of these documents. The 
fourth Gospel stands by itself, and is still a 
problem far from solution. The general 
opinion is that it contains sound historical 
traditions, and even corrects the other three 
Gospels. Nevertheless, as a whole, it is to be 
viewed not as history, but as an interpreta- 
tion of history. Its concern is not so much 
with the facts as with the spiritual meaning 
of the facts. We must, therefore, turn to the 
first three Gospels; and, while it is truth 
to say that " the most conservative student 
cannot throw one of them, in its present 

44 



WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT CHRIST 

shape, back to within a generation of the 
time of Jesus, ' ' 1 it is not the whole truth. 
It may be taken as a certain historical fact 
that our first three Gospels go back to two 
main sources — the Gospel of Mark and a Col- 
lection of our Lord's Sayings, 2 the latter a 
lost document capable of reconstruction in 
part from the material which Matthew and 
Luke have in common without any parallels 
in Mark. That Matthew and Luke used other 
sources may be taken as certain; but we do 
not know what they were. Nevertheless, we 
are in a position to construct from the Gospel 
of Mark and the ' ' Collection of Sayings ' ' an 
intelligible and rational outline of the public 
career of Jesus ; and we are able to learn the 
great organising ideas and principles of 
Christ's thought. The " Collection of Say- 
ings," originally in Aramaic, goes back to the 
Apostolic age, and possibly may have had an 



1 Dole: What We Know about Jesus, p. 5. 
2 This is usually designated as " Q " (from the Ger- 
man "Quelle" — Source). 

45 



THE MODERN MIND 

Apostolic compiler. The Gospel of Mark can- 
not be much later, it is generally agreed, than 
the year 70 A.D., and rests for much of its ma- 
terial on Peter's reminiscences of his Master. 
As Dr. Harnack writes, " As to our knowl- 
edge of the teaching and the history of our 
Lord, in their main features, at least, this de- 
pends upon two authorities, independent of 
one another, yet composed at nearly the same 
time: Where they agree their testimony is 
strong, and they agree often and on important 
points. On the rock of their united testimony 
the assault of destructive critical views, how- 
ever necessary these are to easily self-satis- 
fied research, will ever be shattered to 
pieces." 1 

Another veteran German critic has summed 
up in a few brief sentences almost the entire 
result of a century of critical inquiry into the 
structure of the Gospels: " Mark is no ex- 
cerpt from but an ingredient of the other two 
Gospels. Almost the whole of his material is 
1 Sayings of Jesus, p. 249. 
46 



WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT CHRIST 

found in them. They follow his outline and 
return to it after certain interpolations. 
When they desert his order they differ 
as a rule from one another." 1 " In Mark 
and Q," says an English scholar, u we 
have two independent accounts which 
are alike traceable to a comparatively 
early period. Alike they point to Pales- 
tinian circles, to a tradition which, orig- 
inating on Aramaic soil, is still, on the whole, 
free from foreign influences." 2 We have 
thus two sound sources on which to depend. 
But this is not all. We can use these sources 
as a test by which to sift the other materials 
in the canonical Gospels. Whatever is in 
harmony with the substance of Mark and the 
" Collection of Sayings " may be judged to 
be historical. When this test is applied 
we find, in the words of a recent thorough- 
going critic, that " science rescues the chief 

1 Wellhausen: Einleitung in die drei ersten Evangelien, 
p. 43. 

2 Cambridge Biblical Essays, p. 457. 

47 



THE MODERN MIND 

contents of the synoptic Gospels for the 
life of Jesus." x 

It is true that these sources are very frag- 
mentary and leave many hard problems to be 
solved. But the question is not — Have we 
the materials for a scientific biography of 
Jesus, in the modern sense? but, Have we in- 
formation about Him sufficient to make in- 
telligible His character, His career, and His 
ideas ? To this latter question my answer is 
an unhesitating affirmative. 

We do well to remember that we can never 
hope fully to understand Jesus or His re- 
ligion, not merely because the sources of in- 
formation are so incomplete, but also because 
He is greater than the tradition of His life 
and stands on a spiritual plane far above 
those who saw and heard Him. The remark 
of Goethe has its application here : ' i The eye 
sees what it brings with it the power of see- 
ing/ ' 

We have probably seen the last of the great 

1 Arno Neumann: Jesus, p. 12. 
48 



WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT CHRIST 

scientific biographies of Jesus, though the 
significance of His character and work for 
humanity will be interpreted anew to each 
fresh generation. Theodor Keim's famous 
work, Jesus of Nazara, closes the series of 
classic efforts to reproduce in detail and in 
strict chronological order the life and min- 
istry of the Son of Man. And the reason is 
that we must acquiesce in the uncertainty 
about many of the externals of Christ's 
career — the year and day of His birth, the 
exact year and day of His death, the forces 
that shaped His early development, the 
thoughts that occupied Him as a youth, the 
precise length of His public activity, and the 
precise order of its events, the motives of the 
various actors in the final tragedy; on these 
and other matters of detail we may form more 
or less probable theories, but we cannot speak 
with certainty concerning them. We must 
not, however, let our losses, which are, after 
all, far from vital, shut our eyes to the price- 
less value of what we possess. A careful 

49 



THE MODERN MIND 

study of the earliest sources of the life of 
Jesus can give us certainty of the essential 
matters. We know, for example, partly from 
non-Christian authorities, that Jesus of Naz- 
areth was a genuinely historical person, and 
lived a genuinely human life; that He was 
born in the reign of Augustus, and was cruci- 
fied in the reign of Tiberius. Of this to-day 
any man who will take the trouble can assure 
himself. We know the critical moments in 
His career, and to some extent see how the 
drama develops to its terrible denouement. 
We know His moral, social, and political en- 
vironment, the stage on which the scenes are 
set; Pharisee, Sadducee, Herodian, Eoman, 
the respectable and degraded classes, the men 
of wealth and standing, and the outcasts of 
the proletariat stand before us, not the stuffed 
figures of artifice, but creatures of flesh and 
blood, photographed from life. We know the 
great organising ideas of His teaching, the 
forms in which they were expressed, and 
many of the very words He used. We know 

50 



WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT CHRIST 

what He thought of human life ; what was His 
attitude toward it, what it meant for Him; 
and in knowing this we go to the very heart of 
His message. We know in what His practical 
work consisted ; what He meant when He said, 
" The Son of Man is come not to be min- 
istered unto, but to minister." We know 
how it was that He came into conflict with 
the Jewish authorities, and we can trace the 
gradual darkening of the conflict to its in- 
evitable end in His judicial murder. We 
know that Peter and Paul and James, the 
Lord's brother, and many others, believed 
they saw Him risen from the dead; and we 
know that on this belief the Church was 
founded and started on its world-conquering 
mission. Let us now examine our sources 
for a more explicit account of what has been 
thus summarily stated. 

Jesus appears first in connection with the 
work of John the Baptist. He is drawn from 
His home in Nazareth to be baptised of John 
in the Jordan. The Baptist was not a kind 

51 



THE MODERN MIND 

of Jewish Socrates, as Josephus represents 
Mm, but a figure cast in the grand style of the 
Old Testament Prophets. We cannot get 
close to him, owing to the fragmentary char- 
acter of our information about him, but we 
can see what a gigantic shadow he flings upon 
the stage of the Gospel history. His mes- 
sage is a sharp summons to repentance and 
reformation of life, for the Kingdom of 
Heaven is at hand, and this means judgment, 
immediate, overwhelming, irremediable. He 
likens the Kingdom to an axe driven into the 
root of a barren tree and bringing it down to 
earth; or to a fan with which the husband- 
man separates the chaff from the wheat, and 
the wheat is safely garnered in the barns, 
while the chaff is burned up. The Messiah 
who is about to appear will judge not only the 
heathen, but all the hypocrites and sinners of 
Israel. Upon Jesus the appearance of John 
makes a profound impression. For Him he 
is a prophet and more than a prophet, mark- 
ing the end of the old order of law and proph- 

5g 



WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT CHRIST 

ecy, and heralding a new order, the Kingdom 
of the Messiah. Jesus accepts baptism at his 
hands as an example of dedication to the com- 
ing Kingdom. It is at this consecrated hour 
that a great revelation is vouchsafed Him. 
He hears God's voice within His soul calling 
Him to the work of the Messiah, the actual 
founding of the Kingdom which John an- 
nounces. " Thou art my beloved Son. In 
Thee I am well pleased. " Within Him is 
born a consciousness of power, the fruit of 
the Spirit of God, who now interprets to Him 
the hopes and aspirations of His past. This 
revelation marks a crisis which He must face 
alone. He feels Himself irresistibly com- 
pelled — " driven," as Mark realistically says, 
to bury Himself in the solitude of the desert, 
that He may come to terms with this new 
experience and decide His future course. 
Here it was that He passed through a bitter 
struggle, in which His new-found Messianic 
consciousness was tested to the uttermost. 
The drama of the Temptation, related in the 

53 



THE MODERN MIND 

" Collection of Sayings " in allegorical 
form, 1 is so psychologically probable in itself 
that, as has been observed, even had we no 
record of it we should be compelled to assume 
some such experience. His temptations 
sprang out of the conviction that He was the 
Messiah. Hence they are on a great spiritual 
scale and such as could visit only a great soul. 
He was tempted to grasp at world-wide sov- 
ereignty by means of brute force and political 
expedient. He was tempted to transgress the 
bounds of the natural, and reveal Himself as 
the Messiah, because One guarded by special 
supernatural means. He was tempted to use 
His Messianic powers for personal ends, and 
at the same time prove to Himself the reality 
of the Messianic call. Out of the threefold 
trial He emerges victorious. He appears 
first in Galilee after the Baptist's arrest by 
Antipas, as a prophetic Eeformer reaffirming 
the Baptist's message; only now it thrills the 
hearer with a new note — the note of joy. 2 

1 Matthew iv, 1-11; Luke iv, 1-12. 2 Mark i, 14. 

54 



WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT CHRIST 

His message is a Gospel that is a word of 
good from God to men. It speaks not of 
judgment only, but of salvation. Jesus 
knows that in His own person the Kingdom 
has become a fact, and in its blessedness He 
would have all men share. Thus it was He 
became a Teacher and Healer, laying down 
the nature and principles of the Kingdom and 
showing it actually at work in the lives of 
men, banishing disease and pain and misery. 
How can we be sure that the substance of 
the teaching ascribed in the Gospels to Jesus 
really came from Him? First of all, its in- 
herent spiritual greatness, its profound in- 
sight into God and the human soul ; its ethical 
sweep and range, unifying the religious and 
moral consciousness; its comprehensive yet 
intensely personal quality, its inner unity, 
based on a definite and clearly conceived view 
of the world — all these characteristics stamp 
it as the product of one original, creative 
Mind. And then the form in which for the 
most part the thought is cast, though familiar 

55 



THE MODERN MIND 

to the teachers of His time, is here used with 
unexampled ease and mastery, freshness and 
pliability. Paradox, similitude, hyperbole, 
sententious saying, and parable are the 
vehicles of His message, and they have be- 
come the familiar language of religion in 
every Christian land. The inner harmony of 
His thought is strongly attested by the fact 
that its main elements can be reduced to one 
or other of a few formative ideas — the idea 
of God as Father or of man as God's son, or 
of love as the true bond of man to God and 
man to his brother, or of sin as a breach of 
this bond, or of the Kingdom of God as a so- 
ciety of souls ruled by love and enjoying per- 
fect peace and blessedness. 

The name of God which Jesus loved best 
and which was ever on His lips, was 
1 i Father. ' ' The word itself may mean much 
or little. It all depends on our experience 
of the relation it symbolises. There are 
earthly fathers, and were they to in- 
terpret God to us we should fall into 

56 



WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT CHRIST 

despair and close with pessimism as 
our final creed. Greek poets and philoso- 
phers, Old Testament prophets and Psalm- 
ists, some of the later rabbis had learned to 
name God " Father,' ' but it was the simple 
human thought of Jesus that fills the name 
with all that makes God dear to the heart, 
that transforms the Divine Fatherhood into a 
living reality, a glad possession of the soul. 
He sees the reflection of God's tender-hearted 
Fatherly goodness everywhere in nature and 
humanity — in the clothing of the lilies, in the 
rain that falls upon the just and upon the un- 
just, in the beneficence that notes even the 
death of a sparrow, in the instincts of men, 
who know how to give good things to their 
children. When He calls God " Father " He 
says something that appeals not to the in- 
tellect merely, but to the whole man, and 
something that all men and not philosophers 
only can understand. He assumes as an ac- 
knowledged truth the Divine existence, and 
proceeds to disclose, in terms of the highest 

57 



THE MODERN MIND 

spiritual aptitudes of man's own life, tlie 
character of the existence thus assumed. 

Man is God's child. This is, of course, the 
correlate of Divine paternity. And as Mil- 
ton says, " the relation stands," even though 
sin robs it of its glory and its joy. Here the 
best illustration of Christ's thought is the 
Parable of the Prodigal Son. The son may 
waste his substance in a far country, but the 
father has not forgotten him, still loves him 
with a love that has now become a pain ; and 
when the wanderer returns the father's pent- 
up emotion gives way, and he takes him to 
his arms again and overwhelms him with the 
tokens of his gladness. " Such," said Jesus, 
" is a picture of how God feels to the sinner 
and the outcast." 

li was because men were God's children, ig- 
norant, misled, mistaking the shadow for the 
substance, that Christ's view of sin, unlike 
that of His contemporaries, did not make for- 
giveness impossible. Nowhere do the sanity, 
moderation, and closeness to reality of 

58 



WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT CHRIST 

Christ's teaching, when compared with that 
of other religious leaders, appear more con- 
spicuously than in His view of moral evil. 
He recognises the horror and shame of guilt, 
and yet he finds publicans and sinners more 
accessible than the respectable classes. The 
Pharisee is conscious of no lack; but Christ 
has only to say the fitting word and the pub- 
lican melts in tears and becomes the most 
charitable of men. Everywhere Jesus moves 
about with the eye of an optimist. His be- 
lief in the native goodness of the soul creates 
the very goodness in which He believed. To 
His eye men and women were not hopeless 
criminals. They were only sheep, lost upon 
the mountains, and to be gathered into the 
Father's fold. And yet there is no trace of 
sentimentalism, of confusion of moral issues, 
in His treatment of sinners. He knows that 
sins of the flesh are murderous, cruel, and, 
if persisted in, spell ruin to body and soul. 
But He also recognises that as long as love 
is not wholly killed in man or woman, they 

59 



THE MODERN MIND 

are not beyond the possibility of redemption. 
With profound insight, He selects three sins 
for special condemnation, because they are 
the sins that kill love. The first is that of 
the typical Pharisee. It is the sin of self- 
satisfaction, of profound self-deception, of 
believing one's self to be possessed of a char- 
acter to which he can lay no real claim. It is 
this lie in the soul which Jesus blasts with 
His scorn. The second sin is that of worldli- 
ness. He pictures the God of the worldling, 
whose name is Mammon ; and this god blinds 
the eyes of His worshippers so that they have 
a false view of the values of life. A mam- 
mon-worshipper cannot enter the Kingdom of 
God, into which the poor and the despised 
pass readily. The cares and riches and 
pleasures of this life so entangle the soul in 
their soft meshes that when God summons it 
to sacrifice or service, it cannot obey. The 
third sin is callousness of heart. We see this 
portrayed in the picture of the elder brother 
in the Parable, who will not forgive the 

60 



WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT CHRIST 

Prodigal, and in the Parable of the Unmerci- 
ful Servant, who, having been forgiven an 
immense debt, treats harshly a poor fellow- 
servant who owes him a few paltry dollars. 
Jesus has thus reversed the usual judgment 
of men who hold up to special reprobation 
anti-social sins. Jesus pierces to the depths 
of the heart, and reveals the worldly-minded, 
the hypocritical, and the hard-hearted, as the 
worst of sinners. There is one saying, mys- 
terious and terrible, yet an indubitable utter- 
ance of Christ, a saying which has plunged 
many a poor distracted spirit into fear and 
foreboding. " There is," says Jesus, " an 
unpardonable sin: it is speaking against the 
Holy Spirit." * The saying must be viewed 
in the light of Christ's teaching as a whole. 
The unpardonableness of the sin will then be 
seen to spring not from God's or Christ's un- 
willingness to forgive, but from the fact that 
the sinner refuses to let the offered forgive- 
ness enter. It is a state of wilful and per- 

1 Matthew xii, 32; Luke xii, 10. 

61 



THE MODERN MIND 

sistent trampling under foot of the love of 
God revealed in the gracious activities of His 
spirit. 

" The Kingdom of God " is a phrase which 
Jesus found in popular use as a semi-reli- 
gious, semi-political catch- word. He takes it 
up, fills it with new meaning, and makes it 
the central theme of His Gospel. The King- 
dom of God is the gradual organisation of 
society in accordance with the supreme prin- 
ciple of love, in which every man will receive 
according to his need and will serve accord- 
ing to his capacity, and in which the great 
truths of God's Fatherhood and man's 
brotherhood will be actually realised. This 
is the spiritual essence of Christ's idea. It 
was indeed set forth in the imagery of 
prophet and apocalyptist. How else could 
it have been made intelligible? To the 
prophetic eye the perspective of history 
seems foreshortened; and so it need not sur- 
prise us to find Jesus believing with the 
pious kernel of His people that the Kingdom 

62 



WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT CHRIST 

was " at the doors, " was about to break 
forth, though the exact moment was known 
only to God. He expresses His thought in 
paradoxical terms. The Kingdom is pres- 
ent, yet future ; external, yet spiritual ; a task 
to be achieved, yet also a free gift of God; 
catastrophic and spectacular, yet one with a 
germinating seed, with the permeating 
leaven. " Was Jesus Christ a Socialist? " 
modern men ask. Yes, and more than a So- 
cialist. It is because of this more that mod- 
ern socialism has never come to terms with 
Him. Was he, as some critics would have us 
believe, an apocalyptic seer, for whom all his- 
tory was condensed into a few brief moments 
to be followed by cataclysm, judgment, and 
the Kingdom of Heaven opened to all believ- 
ers? Yes; He was a seer and more than a 
seer; and hence the hopes and dreams, the 
visions and views of His contemporaries, can 
help us to understand His speech, but do not 
exhaust the significance of His thought. He 
is so simple in His greatness, so great in His 

63 



THE MODERN MIND 

simplicity, that He escapes the categories of 
the modern as He did those of the ancient 
world. 

Let us now turn to the other side of His 
activity — His work as a physician. His 
earliest biographer would have us note how, 
at the beginning of His ministry, He strikes 
the keynote that is to dominate it through- 
out. In Capernaum we hear His twofold 
message, or, rather, His one message with a 
double aspect. He speaks to normal and 
ordered humanity, and He at the same time 
relieves the abnormal and disordered. He 
enters the synagogue and utters the com- 
pelling, inspiring word which holds the hearer 
spellbound by its mingled grace and author- 
ity, 1 and then He exercises the health-creating 
energies of His own lofty will and consecrated 
personality upon a sick man, and restores 
him to self-possession and peace. His works 
of healing are as much a genuinely historical 
element in the Gospels as is His model prayer 

*Mark i, 21 seq. 

64 



WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT CHRIST 

or the Sermon on the Mount. On this point 
all Biblical scholars are agreed. Celsus, the 
great critic of Christianity in the second cen- 
tury, was satisfied that the healing wonders 
recorded in the Gospels were facts; but he 
explained them by saying that Jesus had 
lived for a time as a labourer in Egypt, and 
had there learned the arts of magic. The ex- 
planation we may pass by, but the admission 
is significant. It will perhaps bring home 
to us the historical reality of these stories if 
we select one of them and examine it in the 
light of what modern psychological medicine 
has to say. We will choose one which is gen- 
erally regarded as very difficult, and which, 
indeed, led Huxley into a protracted po- 
lemic against orthodox Christianity. It is 
the story of the demoniac of Gerasa re- 
ported by Mark, and taken over from him, 
with some small changes, by Matthew and 
Luke. 1 The story is told somewhat awk- 
wardly, but with a little reflection it can be 

iMark v, 1-17; Matthew viii, 28-34; Luke viii, 26-39. 

65 



THE MODERN MIND 

made clear. Jesus has landed with some 
disciples on the southeastern shore of the 
Lake, at a spot near a town identified by 
modern travellers with the ruins which 
now go by the name of Gersa or Khersa. 
At this point in the coast there is a 
sharp declivity leading down to the water. 1 
There meets Him a man " with an unclean 
spirit." He comes from the tombs or burial 
vaults in the hillside, where he has taken 
up his abode. His friends have tried to 
tame him by binding him with fetters and 
manacles of iron, just as in the eighteenth 
century, in Europe, insane people were kept 
in filthy cages, their food flung to them 
through the bars, and their lives made hor- 
rible by every device of ignorance and super- 
stition. The sufferer in our story breaks his 
chains and prowls about the tombs and the 
hillsides, a terror to the passers-by. Jesus 
at once addresses the unclean spirit or 
demon: " What is thy name? " The spirit 
1 See Encyclopedia Biblica, Art. Gerasa and Gerasenes. 

66 



WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT CHRIST 

replies, using the man's organs of speech, 
" My name is Legion, for we are many." It 
is possible that the man may have seen the 
serried ranks of a Eoman legion, thousands 
strong, with the officor at its head. The 
demon possessing him is like that officer sur- 
rounded by thousands of attendant spirits, 
and in his abnormal state he conceives of the 
demons in terms of this experience. Jesus at 
once commands the demons to depart, and is 
answered by the cry, " What have I to do 
with Thee, Jesus, thou Son of the Most High 
God? I adjure Thee, by God, torment me 
not! " But already the demon knows that 
he is worsted. Probably it is the steady gaze 
of Jesus, to which there is more than one al- 
lusion in the Gospels, straight into the eyes of 
the demoniac, as well as the sharp, authori- 
tative word, carrying in them the force of 
Christ's unique personality, that work the 
man's deliverance. Speaking for the spirits, 
he entreats Jesus not to send them out of 
the country — a reflection, of course, of pop- 

67 



THE MODERN MIND 

ular beliefs about the habits of demons. 
Catching sight of a herd of swine feeding on 
the hillside, the man's disordered fancy sug- 
gests that the demons might go into them. 
Our Lord gives the necessary permission. 
Then the swine rush down into the sea and 
perish. By the exercise of a little imagina- 
tion we can picture the scene. The poor suf- 
ferer, convinced that the evil powers which 
have so long ruled him are about to depart 
and seek a fresh home in the swine, is caught 
in a final paroxysm. He utters loud and 
piercing cries. His gestures are wild and ter- 
rifying. Some of the animals, catching sight 
of him, stampede, communicate their panic to 
the rest, and they all blindly rush to their 
death. The people of the town who own the 
swine hurry out and behold the strange spec- 
tacle of the demoniac, now clothed and in his 
proper senses, sitting at the feet of Jesus. 
Christ's power strikes them with fear. He 
seems to hold sway over those occult forces 
that haunt the dim recesses of the world; 

68 



WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT CHRIST 

they beseech Him to depart out of their 
neighbourhood. But the poor demoniac, who 
for the first time has been treated with love 
and power, begs Jesus that he may speak 
with Him. The Master, however, has other 
views about him. ' c No, ' ' He says ; " go 
home to your own people and tell them all 
that God has done for you." 

Such is the story. Is it historical? 1 Let 
me first offer two or three general considera- 
tions. In the first place, the belief in demons 

*The story is a sad crux for the commentators. 
B. W. Bacon (The Beginnings of Gospel Story, pp. 57-59) 
follows Strauss (New Life of Jesus, Vol. II, p. 184) in 
rejecting it as a piece of pure fiction or legend. E. P. 
Gould (International Critical Commentary, Mark) accepts 
it as in the main historical, but deals only with its 
literary aspects. J. Wellhausen (Das Evangelium Marci, 
p. 42) thinks it strange that the incident of com- 
manding the demons to enter the swine should have 
been attributed to Jesus. The Jewish scholar, C. G. 
Montefiore (Synoptic Gospels, Vol. I, in loco), follows 
Wellhausen, and believes that this element belonged to 
a Jewish folk-tale originally unconnected with Jesus. 
A. Menzies (The Earliest Gospel, pp. 68-70; 121, 122), 
accepting the story as it stands, explains it by 
a general reference to modern mental and nervous 
disorders. Johannes Weiss (Das alteste Evangelium, pp. 
185-190) defends the historical character of the narra- 

69 



THE MODERN MIND 

and in their power to enter the bodies of men 
and of animals cannot be cited to the preju- 
dice of the narrative, because this was a uni- 
versal belief in the first century. In the sec- 
ond place, we know from the synoptic Gospels 
that conflict with demons entered very con- 
siderably into the experience of Jesus. 
As Strauss says, if He healed sick people 
at all He must have cured demoniacs. In 
the third place, the interest of the Evangelist 
is not, as one may suppose at first sight, in 
the power of Jesus over demons, but in the 

tive, and refutes the mythical theory. The weakness of 
the writers with whom I am acquainted is that they 
have not carefully compared the symptoms of the man's 
disorder with modern analogies. Those who accept 
the story as fundamentally historical, content them- 
selves with a general reference to maniacal insanity. 
Experts in psychiatry, however, tell us that mania is 
never characterised by a systematised delusion such 
as this sufferer exhibits. 

Dr. Morton Prince has kindly allowed me to quote his judg- 
ment — " There are only two views possible — either mania or 
hysteria. No fact stated is incompatible with hysteria, while 
some of the facts point directly to it; on the other hand, while 
some of the facts are compatible with mania, other facts are 
incompatible with it. On the whole, the probability is that it 
was a case of hysteria." 

70 



WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT CHRIST 

outcome of the incident, namely, the fear of 
the town's people, their refusal of Christ's 
ministry, His quick departure, leaving behind 
Him as a preacher the man who has been 
cured. The aim of the narrator is to explain 
why Jesus was compelled to return so quickly 
from the pagan neighbourhood on the eastern 
shore. Were it otherwise, and had the nar- 
rator's purpose been to glorify the demon- 
conquering power of the Master, he would 
have stopped abruptly with the disappear- 
ance of the swine in the Lake. Finally, the 
cured man's request that he might attach 
himself to the company of Jesus is a touch 
too psychologically probable to be invented. 

The conclusive argument, however, which 
should dispose, once for all, of any scepticism 
as to the essential historical character of the 
incident, is that the man's disorder and cure 
have analogies in modern medical practice. 
The distinguished neurologist, Professor 
Pierre Janet, of Paris, records a case of de- 
mon possession which he personally treated, 

71 



THE MODERN MIND 

containing many features analogous to those 
in our story. 1 Like the demoniac of Gerasa, 
Professor Janet's patient uttered words 
which seemed to him not his own but those 
of the spirit possessing him, suffered from 
loss of sensibility so that he was unconscious 
of pain, even when sharply pricked, and flung 
about his limbs in obedience to the commands 
of the demon. The case was one of pure 
hysteria, characterised by a profound dis- 
turbance of the subconscious element in mind. 
In the technical speech of the schools, the 
man was suffering from a " dissociation of 
personality "; and this was precisely, as the 
symptoms narrated show, the trouble with the 
demoniac in our story. We have seen that 
our Lord addressed the demon; and the mod- 
ern scientific physician was unable to cure his 
patient until he, too, entered into conversa- 
tion with the demon, and, after a long argu- 
ment succeeded in compelling him to obey his 

x Nevroses et Idees Fixes, 1898, chap, x, Un Cas de 
Possession et ISExorcisme Moderne. 

72 



WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT CHRIST 

orders. If we set aside, as all modern schol- 
ars do, the interpretation which the Evangel- 
ist, in common with the eye-witnesses of the 
scene, and with the whole world of their day, 
placed upon the incident, neither historical 
science nor medical knowledge has anything 
to say against the credibility of this story. 

Let ns now notice the method of treatment, 
which, it must be observed, was very dif- 
ferent from the methods then in vogue. Here 
again we have strong indirect proof that 
we are on the field of genuine history. 
Jesus stands apart from the exorcists of 
His time in His procedure. He uses 
no magical formulas or incantations, such 
as were common in Jewish and in pagan 
circles. With the power of His bare per- 
sonality He confronts the kingdom of mental 
and moral evil. All here is simple and 
sublime. " His action," as Matthew Arnold 
says, " is like the grace of Eaphael, or the 
grand style of Phidias, eminently natural; 
but it is above common low-pitched nature; 

73 



THE MODERN MIND 

it is a line of nature not yet mastered or fol- 
lowed out." 1 Further, it is to be noted, He 
does not blame the demoniac, as though his 
miserable state was the penalty of sin. In 
some instances of sickness, as, for ex- 
ample, in the case of the man with a 
palsy, He does, indeed, appear to re- 
gard the illness as the consequence of 
some moral fault; but not so here. He 
views the demoniac as a victim, as enslaved 
to forces over which he has no control. 
Hence it will be observed that Christ does not 
ask for faith, as in the cases of ordinary sick- 
ness, simply because the psychical energy re- 
quisite or implied in faith is not possible. The 
man has lost self-control. He believes him- 
self to be the slave of a demon, and the be- 
lief deepens his wretched state. Our Lord 
addresses the demon because (apart from His 
own belief in demoniacal activities) only by 
doing so could He carry conviction of cure to 
a mind full of belief in the reality of demon 

1 Literature and Dogma, chap. v. 

74 



WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT CHRIST 

possession. Finally, the restored demoniac 
is not permitted to accompany the Master, 
but is sent to proclaim what God has done for 
him, among his own people. Here, again, 
modern science vindicates the wisdom of 
Christ, for a great, if not, indeed, the great- 
est therapeutic agency in mental troubles is 
the power of unselfish work, which acts at 
once as suggestion and re-education. Only 
through filling the mind with sound, inspiring, 
constructive ideas, can insane, morbid, and 
destructive ideas be cast out and kept out. 
It is another indirect proof of the genuine- 
ness of the healing stories that nowhere does 
Jesus call attention to anything wonderful 
about His work. Always does He empha- 
sise its character as revealing the love and 
pity of God. 

To aid Him in His work as Teacher and 
Healer Jesus gathers about Him a little band 
of twelve disciples, a nucleus of simple, sus- 
ceptible spirits within a larger mass of more 
or less convinced adherents. Of the Twelve, 

75 



THE MODERN MIND 

three were especially devoted to Him — John, 
James, and Peter; and at critical moments 
we find them by His side. Two of these men, 
John and Peter, were destined to play a great 
part in the founding of the infant church, 
after the Master's death. Of the rest we 
know but little. We do know, however, that 
they were all Galileans except Judas of Keri- 
oth, whose memory has been loaded with 
scorn and infamy throughout the Christian 
centuries. He was a Judean, and doubtless 
a political enthusiast who had never felt him- 
self quite at home with the Master. To these 
men Jesus particularly devotes Himself, initi- 
ating them into the deeper meaning of His 
parables, the secrets of the Kingdom, which 
could not be profitably unfolded to the larger 
circle of His hearers. Of these secrets the 
most momentous is that of His person. It 
breaks upon them gradually, through daily 
companionship with Him. They walked and 
talked and ate with Him. They saw Him in 
public and in private, and were thus prepared 

76 



WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT CHRIST 

for the revelation when it dawned upon them. 
After a period of instruction, He sends them 
out on a missionary journey, two by two, to 
proclaim the nearness of the Kingdom, and 
to heal the sick. On their return, with glow- 
ing reports of success, He gives them a hint 
of the real greatness of the work they are en- 
gaged in. They are actually fulfilling ancient 
prophecy and bringing in the Kingdom. 1 But 
now His work and theirs receives a check. 
He had, at an earlier time, broken with the 
Jewish leaders at Capernaum, over the ques- 
tion of the lawfulness of healing on the Sab- 
bath Day. His opponents, Pharisees and 
Herodians, entered into a conspiracy to get 
rid of Him. 2 But now not the Pharisees of 
Galilee only, but emissaries from the reli- 
gious headquarters at Jerusalem, openly 
charged Him with sedition against the law 
of Moses, especially on questions of cere- 
monial purity. Levitical regulations, which 
they regarded as eternally binding, He sets 

1 Matthew xiii, 16, 17; Luke v, 23, 24. 3 Mark iii, 6. 



THE MODERN MIND 

aside brusquely as irrelevancies. The real 
question, according to Him, is: What is the 
condition of the heart? This, of course, was 
a revolutionary word, and marked a crisis in 
His relations with the Jewish leaders. Hence 
we find Jesus withdrawing from Jewish ter- 
ritory, wandering with His company of fol- 
lowers in the neighbourhood of Tyre and 
Sidon, and in the pagan parts of Decapolis, 
and then northward again in the villages of 
Cesarea Philippi. It is while in this last dis- 
trict that another critical incident takes place. 
He brings the views of His disciples about 
Himself to clear consciousness by asking 
them what the people generally thought about 
the Son of Man. Eeceiving the reply that He 
is taken by some for one of the older Proph- 
ets, by others for John the Baptist, risen from 
the dead, by others again, for Elijah, fore- 
runner of the Messiah, He puts the testing 
question, " But who say ye that I am? "* 
His bosom friend Peter replies, " Thou art 

x Mark viii, 29. 

78 



WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT CHRIST 

the Messiah." He accepts the title, but en- 
joins silence. The time is not ripe for its 
disclosure to the world. Were it generally 
known it might lead to grave danger for all 
concerned, for His Messianic ideal is not that 
of His countrymen. From this point onward 
we hear a new note not unheralded in His ut- 
terances. He speaks of judgment at the 
hands of " elders, chief priests, and scribes,' ' 
of suffering and of death; not glory, but 
shame and humiliation are to be the Mes- 
siah's portion. His hour of exaltation will 
come, but it is not yet. 1 To Jerusalem, then, 
Jesus will go, to force the hand of His enemies. 
He will there present Himself as the Son of 
the Lord of the Vineyard, and call upon the 
leaders of the nation to acknowledge Him for 
what He really is. Accompanied by His 
disciples He returns through Galilee to 
Capernaum, where He once again speaks 
about the conditions of entrance into the now 
imminent Kingdom. Leaving Capernaum, 

1 Mark viii, 38. 

79 



THE MODERN MIND 

He passes through the country east of the 
Jordan. Here we learn from Luke that He 
receives a warning of Herod's hostility, and 
sends back a reply which bears its authen- 
ticity on its face. " Go and say to that fox, 
Behold, I cast out demons and perform cures 
to-day and to-morrow, and the third day I 
am perfected. ' ' 1 We do not know how long 
the journey through Peraea lasted (it must 
have occupied a few weeks), but we do know 
that on the Monday preceding the Passover 
of that year He entered Jerusalem riding on 
an ass, in accordance with ancient prophecy, 
and was acclaimed by the multitude as the 
Messiah. From Monday to Easter morning 
we have a clear and convincing record of 
events. On Monday night He stays at Beth- 
any, a village a few miles from Jerusalem. 
On Tuesday a dramatic scene takes place 
which hastens the impending tragedy. Jesus 
enters the Temple precincts and sees the fore- 
court full of huckstering, trafficking traders 

*Luke xiii, 32. 

80 



WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT CHRIST 

buying and selling animals for the sacrifices 
and exchanging the foreign money for the 
sacred coinage of the priesthood. He 
watches piety making money under the cloak 
of serving God, and as He watches He is 
filled with prophetic indignation. As the 
Messiah, God's Son, He feels Himself armed 
with full authority to achieve a great deed of 
reformation. He turns out the rabble by 
force of arms and proclaims the Temple no 
longer a den of robbers, but a house of prayer 
for all nations. From this forward it is a 
battle to the death between Jesus and His 
enemies. Yet He will not deliberately court 
assassination, and so He prudently retires for 
the evening outside the city walls. 1 By day 
He continues to teach in the Temple porticos, 
and His words make a profound impression 
on all who hear them. Meantime, His op- 
ponents are watching for an opportunity to 
destroy Him. They try to trip Him up in 
argument, and so discredit Him with the peo- 

*Mark xi, 19. 

81 



THE MODERN MIND 

pie, but are foiled by His Divine simplicity 
and wisdom. They cannot touch Him so long 
as He is surrounded by admiring friends. 
At last they resolve to take Him by strata- 
gem, under cover of night, when the crowd 
is no longer about Him. An instrument to 
achieve their fell purpose is at hand. It is 
one of the most certain facts of history that 
the private retreat of Jesus outside the walls 
of Jerusalem was deliberately betrayed to the 
priestly party by one of His disciples, Judas 
of Kerioth. Our two earliest authorities, 
Mark and Paul, are unequivocal on this 
point. 1 On Thursday evening, in an upper 
room in the Holy City, Jesus institutes the 
Last Supper, in which, by means of broken 
bread and poured-out wine, He symbolises 
His death, as the consecration and pledge 
of a new covenant for the forgiveness 
of sin. 2 Supper ended, Jesus and His 
disciples issue forth to the Mount of Olives to 

iMark xiv, 10, 11; I. Cor. xi, 23. 
2 1. Cor. xi, 23, 25. 

82 



WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT CHRIST 

spend the night there. Coming to a place 
called Gethsemane (the " oil press ") He 
falls into profound anguish of soul, " with 
strong crying and tears," as a later writer 
touchingly notes, and the disciples catch a 
broken but precious fragment of His prayer : 
" Abba, Father, all things are possible unto 
Thee ; remove this cup from me ; howbeit, not 
what I will, but what Thou wilt. ' ' 1 Over- 
come by the excitement and mental tension of 
the past few days, the disciples fall asleep 
while Jesus keeps His vigil with God. Sud- 
denly the silence is broken by the sound of 
approaching footsteps. The disciples awake 
to find their Master in the hands of a band of 
Temple police headed by Judas. They offer 
little or no resistance. Jesus is arrested and 
hurried before the Sanhedrin, of which Caia- 
phas is president. We know the charge 
brought against Him. It was that of threat- 
ening to destroy the Temple and erecting an- 
other in its place, " not made with hands.' ' 

*Mark xiv, 36. 
83 



THE MODERN MIND 

This, of course, meant the destruction of the 
Jewish religion, and, according to Jewish law, 
was punishable with death. The witnesses, 
however, could not agree, and the charge was 
thus without legal verification. Jesus Him- 
self refuses to explain the meaning of His 
own words. Caiaphas determines to bring 
matters to a head by convicting the prisoner 
out of His own mouth. Placing himself be- 
fore Him, he put to Him the fateful question : 
"Art Thou the Christ, the Son of the 
Blessed? " Jesus replies in words that seal 
His doom : " I am. And ye shall see the Son 
of man sitting at the right hand of Power 
and coming with the clouds of Heaven." * No 
further evidence was needed. It was rank 
blasphemy and the punishment was death. 
But the death sentence could not be carried 
out by the men who pronounced it. Since the 
year 7 B.C. the heir of Herod the Great had 
been deposed, and Judea and Samaria were 
under the Eoman provincial government. 

1 Mark xiv, 61, 62. 

84 



WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT CHRIST 

Hence it was necessary to hand Jesus over to 
Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor, who was 
at that time in Jerusalem to keep the peace 
among the Passover pilgrims. The charge 
brought against Him before Pilate, however, 
was not blasphemy, which would have had no 
weight before a Roman tribunal, but sedition 
against the Emperor, Pilate at first tried to 
save the prisoner, finding in Him only a harm- 
less enthusiast. But (it would seem) partly 
through fear, partly through desire to gain 
popularity with the Jews, he sacrificed Jesus, 
and delivered Him to the soldiery to be cruci- 
fied. Jesus was nailed to the Cross about 
nine o 'clock on Friday morning, but whether 
this Friday was the 14th or 15th Nisan we 
cannot be certain. He refused a narcotic 
drug of spiced wine, that He might meet the 
last agony with undulled consciousness. At 
three o'clock in the afternoon He cried with 
a loud voice, a cry which in the very dialect 
He used still resounds in history: " Eloi, 
Eloi, lama sabacMhani." The year of His 

85 



THE MODERN MIND 

death was about the year 30. His body 
was taken down from the Cross on Friday 
evening by one Joseph of Arimathea, a 
pious Jew, who placed it in a tomb hewn 
out of a rock, and rolled a stone against 
the entrance. 

A great modern biographer of Jesus has 
truly said " that every other human life has 
finished with the earth at death, and it is an 
axiom of both ancient and modern mankind 
that the dead do not rise again. . . . Tradi- 
tion makes a difference in the case of Jesus. 
To Him there was deliverance from death 
upon the earth itself, and when He departed 
His posthumous influence also became a per- 
petual one. ' ' x What we know about Jesus, 
then, is not bounded by His death, but passes 
beyond it. When we consult our earliest 
sources, Mark unhappily fails us, for it 
breaks off suddenly at the point when the 
women come to the tomb hewn out of the rock 
on Easter morning, to find, to their fear and 

1 Keim: Jesus of Nazara, Vol. VI, pp. 274, 275. 

86 



WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT CHRIST 

amazement, that it is empty. The earliest of 
all our sources, however, Paul's First Epistle 
to the Corinthians, tells us that Jesus ap- 
peared first to Peter, a statement subtly cor- 
roborated by various allusions in the Gospels ; 
then to the Twelve; then to more than 500 
brethren; then to James, the Lord's brother; 
then to a larger group called " all the 
Apostles," and finally, to Paul himself. That 
in these appearances we have genuine experi- 
ences, historical criticism no longer allows us 
to doubt. Differences of opinion, however, 
emerge when the question is raised, Were 
these appearances real ? that is, did they cor- 
respond to some objective phenomena, or are 
they to be explained as purely psychological 
in character, visions beginning and ending in 
the minds of the percipients? It will always 
be possible to explain them in this latter 
sense. Whether we do so or no depends on 
the presuppositions which we bring to the his- 
tory. If we already believe that not death, 
but life, is the ultimate fact of the universe, 

87 



THE MODERN MIND 

if we give weight to the testimony of the 
Apostles that they had seen the risen Lord, 
to the undisputed fact that the Church was 
founded on the Resurrection faith, to the 
further fact that a profound revolution was 
wrought in the mood and conduct of the 
disciples within a few days of the Crucifixion, 
to the agreement on this point between the 
Gospel of Paul and the Gospel of the Galilean 
Apostles, which differ in other respects, to 
the universality of the belief in the Risen 
Christ ten years or so after His death by a 
multitude of Christian churches scattered 
throughout a vast geographical area, to the 
influence of this faith still in the modern 
world — if we give due weight to these con- 
siderations it will be hard to resist the con- 
clusion that the Jesus who was put to death 
on the Cross and laid in the grave, recrossed 
the barriers that separate the world beyond 
from this, to bring hope and strength to His 
discouraged followers, and to send forth His 
religion on its world-conquering errand. We 

88 



WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT CHRIST 

cannot be said to knoiv this as we know 
the facts of His incarnate life, but we 
may well believe it without laying our- 
selves open to the charge of credulity or 
superstition. 



89 



CHAPTER in 

WHAT IS THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION ? * 

It is no exaggeration to say that this is the 
question of the hour. Various causes, specu- 
lative and practical, have conspired to force 
it on the attention of the modern world. The 
Christian apologist finds his science discred- 
ited, for he is uncertain what elements in the 
complex structure of historical Christianity- 
he is really concerned to defend as vital and 
what to abandon as accidental. The student 
of comparative religion, who sees in Chris- 
tianity but one if also the highest form of 
the religious principle, is compelled to go be- 
hind institutions and dogma to their inner 
essence, the experiences which gave them 
birth, in order that he may fix the place of 

*I desire to express my indebtedness for some 
thoughts in this chapter to Wobbermin's Essay in 
Beitrage zur Welter entwickelung der christlichen Religion. 

90 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION 

Christianity in the religious development of 
humanity. The missionary, aware that our 
present ecclesiastical systems grew up ages 
before the emergence of the great idea that 
religion is a human quality, belongs to man 
as man, is anxious to set free the central re- 
alities of the Christian faith from the tradi- 
tions that have grown around them, in order 
that these realities may enter into and pos- 
sess the thought forms of the Oriental mind. 
The preacher, who has to face from Sunday 
to Sunday a questioning and critical audi- 
ence, is concerned to search for the things 
that cannot be shaken, in order that the 
forces of Christian enthusiasm and devotion 
may find free scope for their energies. 
Everywhere men are crying for a religion 
reduced to its simplest terms. People are 
weary of the burden of theological doctrines 
and the punctilios of ritual. They are ask- 
ing for something permanent, something 
verifiable in experience, something, there- 
fore, which no criticism can touch and no 

91 



THE MODERN MIND 

progress in culture can wither. In a word, 
they want to know what Christianity really 
is. Sometimes the answer to this demand 
for simplification does not satisfy, because it 
omits or weakens those elements in religion 
which constitute its very being. Recently 
a highly educated American layman has 
sketched the probable future of religion, in 
a pronouncement from which it would ap- 
pear that religion will gradually transform 
itself into a humanitarian and ethical ideal. 1 
But the distinguished lecturer would have 
done well had he started out by ask- 
ing, " What is religion? and more es- 
pecially, what is the Christian religion? " 
He would then have seen that, though 
ethics is an essential element in Chris- 
tianity, as in all the higher religions, it 
can never be a substitute for the religious 
feeling which passes from this world and its 
interests to a world beyond, to a Power which 
can sustain the soul and guarantee to it per- 

*C. W. Eliot: The Religion of the Future. 
92 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION 

manence and satisfaction amid the tasks and 
discouragements of time. 

What is Christianity? Innocent though 
the question sounds, it is among the most 
difficult and delicate the theologian can be 
called upon to face, for Christianity stands 
first among religions in many-sidedness, in 
elasticity, in capacity to assume different 
forms, to pass through the most diverse 
vicissitudes, and to undergo the greatest 
transformations. Its history is full of ro- 
mantic surprises. It has continually achieved 
the impossible. Born on Semitic soil, it soon 
goes forth into the Graeco-Roman world, 
where in the second century it forms an al- 
liance with Greek philosophy, which lays 
permanent marks upon it. The fourth cen- 
tury sees it heir to the Roman empire, and 
all the manifold influences of the greatest 
civilisation of the ancient world play upon 
it. And when the Empire perishes, and the 
new peoples of the north build on its ruins, 
Christianity survives the catastrophe and 

93 



THE MODERN MIND 

enters on a new lease of life. This life at 
a later time is threatened with secularising 
influences; but it creates the Eeformation 
and clothes itself with fresh power and 
vigor, and when, later still, Protestantism 
itself falls into bondage to the letter, Puri- 
tanism would rule men once more through 
the " weak and beggarly " elements of the 
Old Testament. Modern scholars have taken 
the veil from off the face of Eevelation that 
the true glory of Christianity might appear. 
Nor is the history of the Christian religion 
finished yet. To-day we see it more and 
more appropriating the great product of 
the modern spirit, those forms of organised 
energy based on observation and experiment. 
We are, moreover, witnessing an outburst of 
missionary enthusiasm; and we may be sure 
that when Japan and China are Christian- 
ised we shall have not a weak imitation of 
American or English Christianity, but new 
and unsuspected developments of the spir- 
itual reserves of the Gospel. As one takes 

94 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION 

a comprehensive glance at the history of this 
faith, three things strike him with astonish- 
ment. The first is its power to shake itself 
free from all national and tribal limitations. 
And the second is its apparently infinite ca- 
pacity to renew itself, to emerge out of dark 
pits of corruption and degradation into light 
and purity and increased spiritual energy. 
The third is its power to create different 
forms for itself, and to use the spiritual and 
mental peculiarities of different peoples in 
the creation of these forms. But it is just 
these capacities and aptitudes of the reli- 
gion which almost tempt us to give up in 
despair the possibility of ever reaching the 
ultimate reality, that which constitutes the 
essence of this greatest phenomenon in his- 
tory. And yet if in the spiritual world 
things are as Christianity says they are, if 
it is the embodiment of what is real, and not 
the empty echo of man's hopes and fears, 
then we are justified in distinguishing be- 
tween the Divine revelation as permanent, 

95 



THE MODERN MIND 

and the many interpretations of that revela- 
tion as in their nature transitory and tem- 
porary. Great as are the systems to which 
Christianity has given birth, Christianity it- 
self is still greater. 

When we turn to the students of re- 
ligion, we are met with a bewildering 
variety of answers to this simple ques- 
tion. The sceptical historian sees in the 
Christian religion only a manifestation of 
the higher spirit of Judaism; its love of 
charity, its faith in the future of humanity, 
its joy of heart. 1 The social anarchist sees 
in the Sermon on the Mount, as summed up 
in the saying i i Eesist not evil, ' ' the heart of 
Christ's message and a principle in radical 
opposition to the bases of modern civilisa- 
tion. 2 The social reformer sees in Christi- 
anity a message of hope to the poor and the 
oppressed, and the deathblow of capitalistic 



1 Kenan: Hibbert Lectures, p. 17. 

3 Tolstoi: Christ's Christianity. Eng. trans. KeganPaul, 
Trench & Co., London, 1885. Pp. 106-201. 

96 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION 

tyranny, Jesus being the ideal Socialist. 1 
The philosophical idealist views Christianity 
as the culmination of an age-long religious 
process in which the Infinite reveals itself 
in and to the finite, thereby bringing to ex- 
plicit expression a motive power which had 
been at work all along in the human mind 
and which underlies all religions as their 
principle. 2 The modern liberal Protestant 
finds the simple and naked essence of the 
Christian principle in the soul of Jesus as 
a consciousness or intuition of God as Fa- 
ther and of humanity as His children. 3 The 
Catholic Modernist holds that the liberal 
Protestant dresses the Christian religion in 
his own modern ethical religious ideas and 
then passes it off as the genuine historical 
article. On the contrary, Jesus Christ re- 
fuses to be modernised. He is the Eternal 

1 Naumann: Was heisst Christlich-Sozial? 

2 Caird: Evolution of Religion, Vol. I, pp. 36-83; Vol. II, 
pp. 142-171. 

8 Harnack: Das Wesen des Christentums, p. 44, (What 
is Christianity? p. 63). Foster: The Finality of the 
Christian Religion, pp. 480-518. 

97 



THE MODERN MIND 

Spirit in human flesh, recreating Himself in 
every man through the Church, the Gospel, 
and the Sacraments, which form, as it were, 
a continuation of His incarnate life. 1 The 
conservative Protestant describes Christi- 
anity as the conception or fulfilment of 
God, the world, and man in Jesus Christ, 
who is the incarnation of the whole logos 
of God — of God in so far as He is com- 
municable. 2 

Perplexed by these conflicting voices, we 
are perhaps tempted to give up the prob- 
lem in despair. And yet we may take it 
as certain that any intelligent reader of 
the New Testament who is prepared to exer- 
cise the necessary pains can find out for 
himself what the essential note of Christian- 
ity is. It is true that for a complete and sci- 
entifically reasoned solution of the problem 
it would be necessary not only to survey the 
whole of Christianity, but also to set it in 

1 Tyrrell: Christianity at the Cross-roads. 
a DuBose: The Gospel in the Gospels, p. 279. 

98 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION 

relation to other religions, so as to mark the 
elements it has in common with them, as well 
as the qualities which put it by itself. If 
we were shut up to this mode of procedure, 
it is evident that only trained specialists 
could arrive at any conclusions worth con- 
sidering; and we would then have the curi- 
ous paradox that the great majority of those 
who profess the Christian name do not know 
what their profession really means. As a 
matter of fact, however, we can arrive at an 
answer which meets all practical necessities, 
by an examination of the documents which 
have come down to us in the New Testament 
and which record the religious impression 
which Jesus Christ made upon the minds 
of His disciples and followers. Here we 
see the Christian religion coming to a con- 
sciousness of itself over against Judaism 
on the one hand and paganism on the 
other. 

We speak of Christ as the " Founder " 
of Christianity, and, if we know what we 

99 



THE MODERN MIND 

mean in so speaking, the word will do no 
great harm. Nevertheless, if taken in its 
strict sense, it is too mechanical and external 
to express adequately the relation of Jesus 
to His religion. Institutes are founded, but 
religions grow. The religion does not spring 
from Him, full-made, as Minerva from the 
head of Jupiter. It develops a worship, pre- 
scribed formulas, a belief, an extensive litera- 
ture. Hence the teaching of Jesus alone can- 
not constitute the sum and substance of 
Christianity: first, because this teaching 
leaves large tracts of life untouched and is 
related to an historical situation quite for- 
eign to ours; and, secondly, because the 
Teacher is greater than His words. "We 
must know, then, not only the ruling thoughts 
of Jesus, but also the impression which His 
personality made upon the primitive disci- 
ples. In a word, we must study not only 
the first three Gospels, which contain the 
single, individual features of Christ's mis- 
sion, but we must study also the letters of 

10Q 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION 

Paul and the Fourth Gospel, in which we 
have the spiritual interpretation of Christ's 
earthly history, and in which we see the re- 
ligious experience of the first disciples tak- 
ing shape under the influence of the person 
of Jesus. We can keep clear of all contro- 
verted questions as to the authorship and 
historical character of the Fourth Gospel. It 
is enough for our purpose to acknowledge 
what is universally admitted, that it reflects 
the experiences, feelings, and thoughts of the 
Apostolic age. 

When we open the New Testament we read 
much that does not relate directly to our 
quest. We need a clue so that we may find 
our way speedily to the goal. What is this 
clue? It is to be found in the nature of the 
revelation of the world of spirit which the 
Christian religion professes to make. Every 
religion assumes the existence of a world 
of power and life lying beyond this present 
world and able to give to man what this 
world cannot give. One of the roots 

101 



THE MODERN MIND 

of religion is a sense of unrest, a haunting 
consciousness of evil, a lack of inward peace. 
Eeligion opens man's eyes to another world 
where he can find the things denied him here ; 
and the spiritual worth of a religion lies in 
the nature of the revelation which it brings, 
and in the way in which it connects man with 
the world beyond. The religion of Buddha, 
for example, reveals the utter hollo wness of 
the natural life, its essential evil, and points 
to a moral world order, in submission to 
which redemption is achieved. This is the 
revelation which Buddhism makes of the 
spiritual world. And so, too, with all other 
religions, even the lowest and the coarsest. 
We shall find, then, the distinguishing note of 
the Christian religion when we ask — what 
is its revelation of the spiritual order? Be- 
cent investigation has established beyond 
doubt that the religion of Christ arose in 
connection with late Jewish hopes of the end 
of the age and the ushering in of a Messianic 
Kingdom. The new religion took over from 

102 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION 

the old, belief in one living personal God, 
faith in a Kingdom yet to come. Yet these 
ideas are transformed and transfigured ere 
they enter as elements into Christianity. 
What was it that set them on fire and gave 
them power to move the souls of men and 
to create the new phenomenon which we call 
the Christian Religion? There is but one 
answer. It was Jesus Christ. The tradition 
of the first three Gospels, which preserves 
the most authentic account of His actual 
words, reveal Him as one governed by the 
conviction that God is His Father, and that 
He lives in God as His Son. There is no 
question here of metaphysics. It is a reli- 
gious relation, a state of feeling, an attitude 
of will. The reality of God as His Father is 
so overwhelming that His consciousness of 
it marks Him out as standing in a unique 
relation to God. He knows Himself to be 
God's final Messenger, and as God's Son, 
after Him none greater can arise. He closes 
the temporal order of things and inaugu- 

103 



THE MODERN MIND 

rates an order that is eternal. 1 He alone is 
able to apprehend the Father and His pur- 
poses, and the Father alone apprehends the 
fulness of the Son's inner life; and, because 
of this mutual blending of His life with the 
life of God, He is able to communicate the 
love of God as Father to men. 2 Jesus is 
not, then, the " First Christian/ ' as the 
popular saying goes, for there is a unique 
element in His consciousness which cannot 
be transferred to others. He illustrates per- 
fectly in His own person what His religion 
is to realise progressively through the 
reaches of history. Man's sonship is imper- 
fect, inadequate, dependent; His is perfect, 
ideal, archetypal; the latter is that the for- 
mer may be. Christ Jesus, because He is 

1 Parable of the Wicked Husbandmen. Mark xii, 1-12; 
Luke xx, 9-18; Matthew xxi, 33-44. 

2 Matthew xi, 27; Luke x, 22. In a. passage which 
Professor Schmiedel specially honours as one of " the 
foundation pillars of a really scientific life of Jesus," 
we have an ascending series of spiritual existences at 
the head of which Jesus places Himself. Speaking of 
the day and hour of the end of the world, He declares 
that they are not known even to Him. 

104 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION 

God's Son in perfection, is able to awaken 
sonship in man. Hence His entire ministry 
is dominated by His purpose, whether in 
teaching or in healing, to awaken in man the 
dormant capacity for sonship. The greatest 
of all His parables, the Parable of the Prodi- 
gal Son, is the finest illustration of how He 
sought to achieve His gracious aim. 

So much for the first three Gospels. Let 
us now turn to St. Paul. No doubt the great 
apostle was a Jew before he became a Chris- 
tian, and carried with him into the new faith 
many Jewish ideas, modes of thought, and 
forms of argument. But the important ques- 
tion is — What is the motive power, the vital 
principle, which animates his entire con- 
struction of ideas? It is the Sonship of 
Jesus Christ. In that consecrated hour 
when on the road to Damascus ' ' his only 
hate " was transformed into " his only 
love," he experienced a change which in 
after years he described as a revelation 
within him of Jesus Christ as the Son of 

105 



THE MODERN MIND 

God. 1 The God in whom he believed was a 
God who sent forth His Son that He might 
bring men into the blessedness and glory of 
the filial spirit. 2 This is the characteristic 
mark of Christian as distinguished from 
Jewish or pagan piety — a consciousness of 
freedom, of victory over every enemy of the 
spiritual life through the new-found sense 
of sonship to God which Jesus Christ had 
awakened within the soul. The first Chris- 
tian apology is a hymn in honour of Jesus 
Christ who, as God's Son, makes an end of 
the old order with its angelic mediators, 
sensuous sacrifices, legal institutions, vener- 
able symbolisms, and inaugurates the new 
era, the characteristic note of which is ac- 
cess to and filial fellowship with the Father. 
One of the great structural ideas of the 
Fourth Gospel is that in Jesus Christ men 
find God and know Him as their Father. 
Christ's words to Philip in his farewell dis- 

1 Galatians i, 12. 

'Romans viii, 3; Galatians iv, 5. 

106 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION 

course, if historical, have an obvious signifi- 
cance. If not historical, they at least ex- 
press the impression which the Master had 
made on the Christians of the first century. 
" Philip saith unto Him, ' Lord, show us the 
Father and it sufficeth us.' Jesus saith unto 
him : ' Have I been so long time with you and 
yet hast thou not known Me, Philip? He 
that hath seen Me hath seen the Father, and 
how sayest thou then, Show us the Fa- 
ther? '"* In these words is expressed the 
revolution which had taken place in the 
thoughts of the disciples about God through 
the revelation which they had witnessed in 
the words and deeds, in the whole earthly 
history of Jesus. For now the revelation of 
Judaism, which knew God as the Holy One, 
lifted above nature, infinitely powerful, ter- 
ribly majestic, Who issues His commands to 
His creatures and visits disobedience with 
awful penalties, is superseded by another and 
a higher word. This God of later Judaism 

1 John xiv, 8, 9. 

107 



THE MODERN MIND 

now discloses His real and inmost being as 
Love, whose quality it is not only to com- 
mand the good, but to give the power to ful- 
fil it; not only to punish sin, but also to use 
the punishment as a means by which sin may 
be overcome. In this revelation of God a 
new epoch dawned in the spiritual history 
of man. For the first time the human heart 
finds perfect rest in God. But this revela- 
tion threw a light on the being of the Re- 
vealer. Where did He learn this great new 
thought of God? He discovered it in the 
depths of His own soul. But such a thought 
could only have sprung out of a nature ab- 
solutely pure, perfectly loving. All other 
men, even the greatest of the prophets, had 
dimmed their vision of the Eternal by the 
shadows of their own inward world; but no 
shadow rested on the glory of God as it 
broke on the perfect soul of Jesus. Hence 
He might well be called by way of pre-emi- 
nence the Son of God. It is this proof of 
Christ's unique Sonship that the Church en- 

108 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION 

deavours to preserve in her creeds and 
teaching. To many minds to-day the lan- 
guage of these creeds sounds foreign and 
unreal. The phrases used in the Church's 
worship do not find them. Yet such persons 
should seek to penetrate beneath the phrases 
to their essential thought, which is that 
Jesus is the supreme Revealer of God and 
the ideal humanity. Without this conviction 
our Gospel lacks the note of certainty. Such 
a conviction gives force and energy to Chris- 
tian living and puts a soul into Christian 
morality. We feel we are on the bedrock of 
truth, of the ultimately real. Then for us 
the words of Christ are eternal. His ideas 
have the promise of the future. His pro- 
gramme is the world-programme. Hence we 
can fling ourselves with untrammelled en- 
ergy into the service of man, knowing that 
in loving and in serving Christ, in causing 
His ideas and influence to prevail, we are 
best loving and serving humanity. 

The revelation of love as the ultimate prin- 

109 



THE MODERN MIND 

ciple of the universe would have been incom- 
plete had it stayed at the words and acts 
of Christ. One of the essential elements in 
the Gospel from the very first was the vi- 
carious death of Jesus as a manifestation 
of the love of God. That death indeed was 
felt at first to be in need of an apology and 
could be tolerated only in the light of the 
reflection that He who died rose again into 
life and glory; but after a little it took on 
a glory of its own as the culmination of a 
sacrificial career, the highest moment of a 
redeeming activity. " Greater love hath no 
man than this, that a man lay down his life 
for his friends." 1 " God commendeth His 
love toward us in that when we were yet 
sinners Christ died for us." 2 How was it 
that this wonderful conviction entered the 
mind of the first Christian age ? The answer 
is to be found partly, at least, in the fact 
that the first disciples knew the death of 
Jesus to be a voluntary act. When we turn 

1 John xv, 13. 2 Romans v, 8. 

110 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION 

to the earlier Gospels we see that from the 
first announcement of Jesus that He was the 
Messiah, the thought of suffering took a 
prominent place in His mind. We see, too, 
that at a certain moment He resolved to die, 
in the belief that only through His death 
could His work for those who trusted Him 
be achieved. As He sets His face steadfastly 
to go up to Jerusalem His disciples follow 
Him, amazed and afraid. They surmise His 
great and tragic purpose. It was to give His 
life a ransom for many. In the Parable of 
the Wicked Husbandmen 1 the death of the 
master's son at the hands of the husband- 
men prefigures His own death at the hands 
of the ecclesiastical leaders; but just as in 
the Parable the death of the son led to the 
end of the old order of things and the usher- 
ing in of a new, so His own death will work 
the overthrow of evil and at the same time 
establish the Kingdom of God. Thus His 
death is not something into which He falls 

a Mark xii, 1-12. 
Ill 



THE MODERN MIND 

accidentally; it is rather a moral achieve- 
ment. This, then, may be taken to be one 
of the surest results of historical enquiry — 
that the death of Jesus was at once volun- 
tary and vicarious. " Jesus went to His 
death," says Professor Burkitt, " believing 
that by so doing He was bringing in the 
Kingdom of God. " x " In the secret of His 
passion,' ' says Dr. Schweitzer, " which 
Jesus reveals to the disciples at Caesarea 
Philippi, the pre-Messianic tribulation is 
for others set aside, abolished, concentrated 
upon Himself alone and that in the form that 
they are fulfilled in His own passion and 
death at Jerusalem. That was the new con- 
viction that had dawned upon Him. He must 
suffer for others that the Kingdom might 
come." 2 The thought of the vicariousness 
and voluntariness of Christ's death seized 
the apostolic mind with the force of a revela- 

1 The Transactions of the Third International Congress 
of the History of Religions, Vol. II, p. 328. 

2 The Quest of the Historical Jesus y pp. 386, 387. 

112 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION 

tion. Christ convinced His followers that 
He had power to lay down His life and power 
to take it again and that no man could take 
it from Him. 1 And this laying down of His 
life was an atoning deed. His body was 
broken and His blood was shed for many. 
His death, then, enters as an essential ele- 
ment into the faith He has created. It is 
the culminating revelation of God's love in 
conflict with human crime and passion. 

But this is not all. Christianity is built 
on the conviction that Jesus Christ con- 
quered death and entered into an unbroken 
fellowship of life with God. The Lordship 
of Jesus sums up the earlier Christian creed. 
" If thou shalt confess with thy mouth 
Jesus as Lord and shalt believe in thy heart 
that God raised Him from the dead, thou 
shalt be saved." 2 In the Resurrection we 
have a revelation of immortal life as the 
destiny for which man was created. The 
first Christians knew themselves destined for 

1 John x, 17. 2 Romans x, 9. 

113 



THE MODERN MIND 

eternal blessedness, because Jesus Christ 
had conquered death and had risen into life 
and glory. Think as we may of the tradi- 
tions of the great Event, here is something 
which cannot be gainsaid. The great dy- 
namic force which created the Church and 
gave it the victory was the conviction that 
the Crucified has been raised out of darkness 
and shame and set at the right hand of God. 
It is the figure of a risen, victorious Christ 
which dominates the pages of the New Testa- 
ment. Christianity is what it is because at 
its centre lives the personality of its 
Creator. 

But this supreme revelation of God in the 
person of Jesus is bound up with a new mo- 
rality. It is not that in Christianity reli- 
gion and ethics lie side by side. It is that 
they penetrate each other so perfectly that 
to-day we cannot think of a truly religious 
man who is not at the same time a truly 
moral man. In His own person Jesus has 
shown us that the religious and moral life 

114* 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION 

are not two different vital activities. They 
are rather two different forms of the same 
spiritual functioning. They are one and the 
same vital activity, only directed now toward 
God and again toward man. And this unity 
of the religious and ethical elements in expe- 
rience springs out of the revelation of the 
eternal love of God in life and work, in the 
suffering unto death and in the victory over 
death of Jesus Christ. God is now seen to 
be love. But this, which is the life of God, 
is the highest life of man. Only as man 
loves does he live. " Nothing is original," 
says Father Tyrrell, " in the righteousness 
preached by Jesus." 1 It is true that the ma- 
jority of His ethical commands can be par- 
alleled in the writings of Greek sages and 
Old Testament Prophets, so that in a sense 
we may say all is old. Yet in another sense, 
all is new. For now these commands are so 
connected with the profoundest springs of 
the spiritual life that they cease to be com- 

1 Christianity at the Cross-roads, p. 51. 
115 



THE MODERN MIND 

mands and become the natural and sponta- 
neous expression of the religious conscious- 
ness. The great achievement of Christ is 
that henceforth religion by itself is imper- 
fect. Its end is the blessing and the redemp- 
tion — moral, social, and physical — of human- 
ity. It is this that makes the Christian re- 
ligion a new and at the same time a unique 
phenomenon. Here there is no religious feel- 
ing which does not of necessity translate it- 
self into moral action ; and there is no moral- 
ity which does not draw its motive power out 
of religious faith and which does not at the 
same time by way of reaction deepen this 
faith. 

Christianity, then, centres in the person of 
Jesus Christ. Through Him we gain cer- 
tainty as to the nature of God and the assur- 
ance that in some way good must be the 
final goal of ill. The heart of things is not 
cold and dead, but throbs with an infinite pity ; 
man is not the helpless victim of Nature's 
blind fatalisms, but the child of the Infinite, 

116 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION 

who knows he was not made to die, whose 
highest good is not at the mercy of time, 
but lies hidden in the hand of the Eternal. 
Christ is, as it were, an epitome of the world- 
programme, and the long reaches of history- 
have as their end the realisation of the ideal 
order in His person. He creates a new ethi- 
cal spirit; founds a fellowship of souls, a 
Kingdom of God, in which the highest ener- 
gies of the human spirit are organised in 
harmony with the Divine purpose. And He 
is and does all this because His person comes 
out of the basic realities of the universe and 
is a revelation of ultimate spiritual fact. 
Other religions are greater than their found- 
ers, and in proportion as emphasis is placed 
upon the founder the religion suffers and 
retrogrades. It is far otherwise with the 
Christian religion. If the voice of experi- 
ence and history has a right to be heard we 
must maintain that Christ's relation to His 
Gospel is not accidental, but essential; not 
contingent, but necessary. As He has been 

117 



THE MODERN MIND 

its creator, so is He still its providence. Just 
as our world, divorced for a moment from 
the all-embracing energies of the immanent 
God, would fall into chaos and oblivion, so, 
we may well believe, would Christianity, 
apart from Jesus Christ as the source of 
holy inspiration, perish from the hearts and 
consciences of men. The religion of the fu- 
ture will lie more and more in the realisa- 
tion of the ethical and spiritual supremacy 
of Christ in all the manifold spheres of hu- 
man thought and life. 



118 



CHAPTEE IV 

RELIGION AND MIRACLE 

No apology is needed for raising once more 
the problem of the miraculous and its rela- 
tion to Christianity. It is an old problem, 
but it faces us to-day with new emphasis, 
and clamours for a more adequate solution 
than any that have hitherto been offered. 
The Christian apologist, anxious to disen- 
gage the essential elements of the faith and 
commend them to the intellect of the time; 
the student of comparative religion, who 
finds wonders springing up at the feet of 
every great religious personality and who 
knows that the birth of a religion is always 
accompanied by an invasion of the super- 
natural on the natural and accustomed or- 
der; the theologian who is anxious to estab- 
lish a doctrine of revelation true to history 
and to the nature of the human mind; the 

119 



THE MODERN MIND 

preacher who is conscious of the present per- 
plexity of Christian thought on this subject 
and who feels restrained and hampered be- 
cause he cannot find his way to some clear 
and credible view; the ordinary cultivated 
layman, who is troubled because the Chris- 
tian religion appears to be not only super- 
natural in the sense of spiritual, but su- 
pernatural in the sense of being contrary 
to nature — all these feel the pressure of the 
question and are seeking for some relief. 
The first step in the process of clearing up 
our thoughts on this matter is to know 
exactly where we stand in regard to it 
to-day. 

Until within recent years the problem was 
mainly philosophical or theological. The 
eighteenth century witnessed a kind of com- 
promise between theology and the intellect 
of the age. The dominating philosophy ad- 
mitted the existence of a Deity who created 
the world, impressed on it a rigid system of 
laws, and exercised over it a general non- 
120 



RELIGION AND MIRACLE 

miraculous providence. Theology, on its 
side, admitted the uniformity of nature, but 
maintained the possibility of a Divine in- 
tervention or interference with this uniform- 
ity. It was Hume who destroyed this com- 
promise. For him, miracles are logically 
possible, but practically impossible, because 
incapable of being substantiated by any evi- 
dence. The question he raises is : Have there 
been events which we are compelled to re- 
gard as miracles, that is, as standing out- 
side the law of causality? To this question 
he replies, " No." Human testimony is fal- 
lible and often rests on conscious or uncon- 
scious deception : but natural law is not falli- 
ble; it is universally valid. Therefore, it is 
more probable in any given case that the testi- 
mony to a miracle is false than that a viola- 
tion of natural law should have been a fact. 
This logical puzzle has occupied the atten- 
tion of agnostic and theological reasoners 
alike, down to our own time. Most persons 
will agree that Huxley gets to the heart of 

121 



THE MODERN MIND 

the matter when he says in his criticism of 
Hume : " If a dead man did come to life, the 
fact would be evidence not that any law of 
nature had been violated, but that those laws, 
even when they express the results of a very 
long and uniform experience, are necessarily 
based on incomplete knowledge, and are to 
be held only as grounds of more or less justi- 
fiable expectation. " * In other words, the re- 
sult of the long and weary discussion inaugu- 
rated by Hume is that we are too ignorant 
of the ultimate laws of the universe to as- 
sert that a miracle, in apparent violation of 
these laws, is impossible. 

In our own time, the question has acquired 
a new meaning. One of the ruling ideas of 
modern thought is the historical method. 
We are impatient of high a priori roads 
to truth. We regard the value of tes- 
timony in a way quite foreign to Hume's 
mode of thought. In a word, the question of 
miracle is being transferred from the meta- 

1 Hume, p. 131. 
122 



RELIGION AND MIRACLE 

physical to the historical realm. The pre- 
suppositions of eighteenth-century rational- 
ism no longer trouble us and we are set free 
to consider the problem calmly and judi- 
ciously. Any method which simply lumps to- 
gether all the miracle stories of the Gospels, 
without making any distinction between 
them, either as to the quality of the event 
described or as to the evidence alleged in 
its behalf, and proceeds to discharge the 
whole as unworthy of serious thought, stands 
discredited beforehand. What we want to 
know is whether any of these alleged miracu- 
lous events have sound evidence in their fa- 
vour, and if so, whether they may not be 
interpreted in harmony with modern ideas, 
even though this interpretation must vary 
from that of the original narrators. 

Before turning, however, to the historical 
question, let us ask — What is a miracle in 
the traditional sense? It may be defined as 
a special intervention in the ordinary course 
of nature, by which secondary causes are set 

123 



THE MODERN MIND 

aside by a direct volition of Deity for some 
special purpose. Miracles, in the traditional 
belief, are necessary to revelation in order to 
attest the Divine mission of the prophets or 
of Jesus Christ, and will be wrought by God 
with a view to the salvation of men. They 
were continued through the first three cen- 
turies, but then gradually came to an end, as 
the purpose for which they were wrought, 
namely, the establishment of the Christian 
religion, was achieved. This idea, the prod- 
uct of a scholastic theology, is no longer 
credible to-day. In the first place, the no- 
tion is too theoretical and transcendental. 
It starts with the premise, that God is om- 
nipotent and can do anything, and argues 
that therefore He has done this or that. 
Now, of course, the question is not — 
What can God do? but— What has He 
actually done? and this can be known 
only by a critical examination of history, 
and by the investigation of the facts 
of nature. In the second place, modern sci- 

124 



RELIGION AND MIRACLE 

ence has as its fundamental postulate the 
uniformity of law. The deepest conviction 
of the scientific mind is that there are no 
mysteries which cannot find an ultimate ex- 
planation by some law, known or unknown. 
It is the function of science to reduce any 
given phenomenon to its place as a link in 
a chain, or rather, as an element in an in- 
finitely ramified network which binds it into 
unity with all the phenomena that precede 
it and that coexist with it. Hence Le Conte 
defines miracle as " an occurrence or phe- 
nomenon according to a law higher than 
any we yet know." 1 From this point of 
view, miracle is rather an event the causes 
of which we do not know than the result of 
a Divine intervention. In the third place, 
modern theology no longer accepts the idea 
that the function of miracle is to attest the 
authenticity of a Divine revelation. Here 
the whole stress is placed upon the element 
of wonder or of magic, and the inference is 

1 Evolution and Religious Thought, p. 356. 

125 



THE MODERN MIND 

from a physical portent to the truth of moral 
and religious ideas. Matthew Arnold dis- 
posed once and for all of this scholastic no- 
tion by his famous remark: " Suppose I 
could change the pen with which I write this 
into a penwiper. I should not thus make 
what I write any truer or more convincing.' ' 
Most thoughtful persons to-day will recog- 
nise that the criterion of any truth must be 
found in the truth itself. In other words, 
ethical truth is self-luminous. It shows its 
reality by its correspondence to the ethical 
needs of man, by the mighty changes it has 
wrought in the individual and in society, 
by the fact that in proportion as it is re- 
alised, man rises in the scale of being and 
of worth. 

Having cleared the ground, then, of the 
traditional view, we are in a position to turn 
to the Gospel records which contain the 
miracle histories in which our chief interest 
is centred. 

Since the publication of Strauss's Life of 

126 



RELIGION AND MIRACLE 

Jesus, in 1835, there has been a succession of 
theories seeking to show how the Gospel tra- 
dition was formed and what the sources are 
on which the Evangelists relied. We set 
aside here the Fourth Gospel, as, on any hy- 
pothesis, it stands by itself and cannot be 
taken as a primary authority for the life of 
Jesus. One of the indubitable results of 
critical inquiry has been, as I have tried to 
show, to exalt the general historical trust- 
worthiness of the synoptic tradition, to 
assure us that in this tradition we have 
a genuine picture of Jesus as He lived 
and moved among men. When due em- 
phasis is given to this fact, it may be 
frankly conceded that there are a few ele- 
ments in the Gospels due, no doubt, to the 
influence of legend, to unconscious accretion, 
to the ideas and preoccupations of the primi- 
tive Christian community as to what Jesus 
must have said and done. The point which 
I desire to emphasize is that on any critical 
theory of the Gospels, stories of miracles en- 

127 



THE MODERN MIND 

ter into the earliest discoverable literary 
strata and cannot be got rid of without dis- 
solving the history into myth. Let ns, for 
example, take the latest critical hypothesis 
and one which has gained the support of 
the great majority of New Testament schol- 
ars to-day. This view, in brief, is that our 
present synoptic Gospels have as their lit- 
erary groundwork two documents: (1) The 
Gospel of Mark, which is to be identified sub- 
stantially if not in detail with our present 
canonical Gospel; (2) A Collection of Say- 
ings or Discourses, which comprises the 
matter common to Luke and Matthew, but 
not found in the second Gospel, and which in 
its original form was probably set down in 
Aramaic. These two sources, it is generally 
agreed, were in writing before the year 70. 
Attempts at reconstruction of the Logia, or 
" Collection of Sayings," have been recently 
made, notably one by Harnack. 1 Now in this 

1 The Sayings of Jesus the Second Source of 8t. Matthew 
and St. Luke (1908), pp. 252-271. 

128 



RELIGION AND MIRACLE 

" Collection of Sayings," which is concerned 
not with the deeds but with the words of 
Jesus, we have, nevertheless, a detailed ac- 
count of a miracle which has provoked un- 
necessary scepticism, namely, the healing at 
a distance of the Centurion's servant and an 
allusion to the cure of a dumb demoniac. 
These anecdotes are all the more significant, 
as the motive for their introduction is not 
to call attention to, much less to magnify 
Christ's miracle-working power: but in the 
one case to give an illustration of extraor- 
dinary faith on the part of a Gentile, and in 
the other to show that the overthrow of evil 
by the expulsion of demons, was evidence 
that the Kingdom of God had really come. 
We have in the same source His message to 
John the Baptist: " Go tell John what ye 
hear and see; the blind receive their sight, 
the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed and 
the deaf hear, and the dead are raised up 
and the poor have good tidings preached to 
them." Further, we have the woes pro- 

129 



THE MODERN MIND 

nounced on Chorazin, Bethsaida, and Caper- 
naum, because of their failure to read the 
lesson of His mighty works done in them. 
Let us now turn to the Mark Gospel. Here, 
if we take the Gospel as it has come down 
to us, we find eighteen miracle histories. 
These eighteen are reduced to sixteen if we 
suppose with the majority of scholars that 
the " Cursing of the Fig-Tree " is a misun- 
stood or pragmatised Parable, and the 
" Feeding of the Four Thousand " a dupli- 
cate of the "Feeding of the Five Thou- 
sand.'' It is significant that of the sixteen 
miracles in the second Gospel thirteen are 
wonders of healing, and of the three remain- 
ing only one presents serious difficulties: 
namely, " The Feeding of the Five Thou- 
sand." 

There is a small group of scholars who 
think that our canonical Gospel of Mark can 
be analysed into an earlier tradition resting 
on Peter, worked over by a later editor. 
Now if, for the moment, we accept this hy- 

130 



RELIGION AND MIRACLE 

pothesis we find in the original Petrine tra- 
dition five miracle stories : 

The healing of Peter's mother-in-law; 

The healing of the paralytic in Capernaum ; 

The stilling of the storm ; 

The healing of the woman with an issue 
of blood; 

The raising of Jairus 's daughter. 
Thus the latest criticism vindicates the re- 
mark of Theodor Keim: " It is the genuine 
historical Jesus who is here exhibiting His 
compassion towards the needy, is indignant 
at the power of the evil one, and is con- 
strained to put forth His healing virtue, 
works fundamentally by His spiritual word, 
and requires spiritual faith, and finally im- 
poses silence upon those who are healed. 
This is a Jesus such as that sensuous, 
miracle-seeking age could scarcely have 
invented. ' ' * 

Let us now ask, — What, according to the 
earliest sources, is our Lord's own attitude 

1 Jesus of Nazara, Vol. Ill, p. 172. 
131 



THE MODERN MIND 

to miracles? We have the answer in a say- 
ing which is found in the Logia and which 
even Schmiedel admits to be unquestionably 
genuine : ' ' An evil and adulterous genera- 
tion seeketh after a sign and a sign shall not 
be given to it except the sign of Jonah, for 
as Jonah became a sign to the Ninevites, so 
shall also the Son of Man be to this genera- 
tion. ' ' * Christ appeals to the signs and 
wonders which He wrought and yet refuses 
to have a miracle wrung from Him by His 
generation, declines to pander to the crude 
supernaturalism which could find God only 
in the portents of magic. As Jonah, the 
preacher of repentance, was a sign to the 
men of Nineveh, so His preaching of the 
Kingdom of God was a sign to the men of 
Palestine. It spoke not to the childish and 
superstitious love of marvels, but to the in- 
tuitions of reason and of conscience. Thus 
it is clear that, as Sabatier says : i i Prodigy 
properly so called, is quite foreign to the 

1 See Harnack: The Sayings of Jesus, p. 266. 

132 



RELIGION AND MIRACLE 

wholly moral conduct of His life and to the 
strictly religious conception of His work. 
He did not found His religion on Miracle, 
but on the light, the consolation, the pardon, 
and the joy which His Gospel, issuing from 
His holy living, brought to broken and re- 
pentant souls." 1 So far from wishing to 
gain power or influence through His mira- 
cles, He forbade those who were healed to 
talk about the cure, and He attributed the 
cure not to Himself, but to the faith of the 
cured. On the other hand, that He wrought 
what were then deemed miracles is a fact 
based as we have seen on the rock of genuine 
history. Renan admits His wonder-working 
activity, but thinks that it was a role im- 
posed on Him by the men of His time and 
place against His will and better judgment. 
The apology is an insult — a gratuitous de- 
fence of what needs no defence, but rather 
wins our reverence and our honour. Jesus 
gave Himself to His healing work with all 

1 Outlines of a Philosophy of Religion. Eng. trans., p. 73. 

133 



THE MODERN MIND 

the energy of His soul, in glad abandon. 
Wherever He went, the despairing revived, 
the miserable found some surcease of pain, 
cries of joy and gratitude filled His ears and 
made music in His heart. What diviner 
work could Jesus have done? He loved the 
sick and the wretched with infinite love, and 
therefore He healed them. His attitude to- 
ward the miracles is thus seen to be discrimi- 
nating and judicious. He works miracles 
indeed, but only in the interests of suffer- 
ing humanity and out of a God-like pity. He 
works no miracle that would contribute to 
falsity, to superstition, or to idle curiosity. 
It has been said — and the saying is in a 
sense true — that " if all the miracles were 
gone the vision of Jesus would remain." 1 
But would not the vision of Jesus be im- 
measurably impoverished if the deeds 
through which shine His deep compassion 
for the sufferings of humanity should turn 
out to be nothing more than a halo of glory 

1 Gordon: Religion and Miracle, p. 85. 
134 



RELIGION AND MIRACLE 

created by the love of a later age ? The per- 
sonalities who have powerfully affected the 
world have not been merely thinkers and 
teachers: they have been also workers and 
sufferers. Without His works of compassion 
in the healing of the diseased, one of the divin- 
est aspects of Jesus' character would be lost. 
The last question on which a few words 
must be said is, — What must be the attitude 
of educated men to-day to the miracle stories 
of the Gospels? When we examine the ma- 
terial given in the two primary sources, the 
Mark Gospel and the " Collection of Say- 
ings, ' ' we note that the eighteen miracles re- 
ported may be divided into four classes: 

(1) Ordinary acts of healing; 

(2) Expulsion of demons; 

(3) Eaising of the dead; 

(4) Miracles wrought on nature. 
Fourteen of these stories belong to the first 
two classes, — miracles of healing, mental 
and physical. These deeds of mercy are thus 
seen to be the most characteristic of Christ 

135 



THE MODERN MIND 

and the most frequent in His career. They 
are, at the same time, most in accord with 
well-known analogies in modern experience. 
The old view of the relation of mind and 
body which could permit Huxley to say that 
our consciousness can no more affect our 
physical life than a steam-whistle can run 
a locomotive, raises a smile to-day. The his- 
tory of medicine, every psychological clinic 
in the world, contradicts it. Every neurolo- 
gist knows that in the great class of disor- 
ders where moral and psychic factors are at 
work, it is impossible to exaggerate the up- 
lifting and unifying influence of personality. 
We have but to keep this in mind, and then 
think of the matchless vital endowment with 
which the Lord Jesus came into the world, 
to find the inference most credible that the 
unique psychical quality of that life should 
have unique psychical and psycho-physical 
results. There is an indirect but weighty 
confirmation of this view in the fact that the 
influence of His personality is not portrayed 

136 



RELIGION AND MIRACLE 

as working magically or without regard to 
law, for it demands as the psychological me- 
dium for its healing power faith on the part 
of the sufferer, or of his friends, or of both. 
In Nazareth, Mark tells us, He could do no 
mighty work because of their unbelief. The 
educated physician of to-day knows that the 
faith of his patient, whatever the nature of 
the disease may be, is one of the most power- 
ful allies that he can count upon; and the 
reason is because faith is not a mere abstract 
intellectual assent, but has an emotional 
tone, implies the feeling of trust, confidence, 
expectation — which, absorbing the whole 
mind, contributes to the right functioning of 
the psycho-physical organism. 

To the same category belongs the expul- 
sion of demons. The theologian and the stu- 
dent of medicine are pretty generally agreed 
that in every case of demon possession de- 
scribed in the New Testament there is to be 
recognised some well-known form of nerv- 
ous or mental disease. The lunatic boy at 

137 



THE MODERN MIND 

the foot of the Mount of Transfiguration pre- 
sents all the symptoms of an epileptic. The 
" man with an unclean spirit " in the syna- 
gogue of Capernaum reflects all the marks of 
a dissociated personality, such as are charac- 
teristic of acute hysteria. And the same 
theory explains the case of the demoniac of 
Gerasa. It 'was natural that in an age when 
the belief in demons was widespread and the 
science of abnormal psychology as yet un- 
born, people who perceived the strange and 
inexplicable alteration in the thought and 
speech and conduct of their friends should 
conclude that this was owing to the presence 
of a foreign and evil spirit. It was in deal- 
ing with these unhappy victims of mental 
disturbance that Jesus was especially suc- 
cessful, though He claimed no monopoly of 
the healing gift. The restoration of the dis- 
eased to their normal selves, the destruction 
of the evil power which enslaved them, was 
for Jesus a most significant sign of the pres- 
ence and power of the Kingdom of God. 

138 



RELIGION AND MIRACLE 

These relative miracles, if so we may call 
them, are finding more and more acceptance 
with the most enlightened theologians of our 
time. Their general attitude is well summed 
up by Professor Wernle when he says: " In 
the Gospels Jesus appears before us first 
of all as the physician of men's bodies, as the 
redeemer of the sick and suffering. How- 
ever great the number of miraculous narra- 
tives that we set on one side as exaggera- 
tions or inventions of a later age, a nucleus 
of solid fact remains with which we have to 
deal. Jesus possessed a healing power 
strictly limited, it is true, by unbelief, but 
capable of producing the very greatest 
physical and psychical changes wherever He 
encountered faith. This power operated es- 
pecially in the case of mental diseases, but 
was by no means confined to them. ' ' 1 The 
story of the raising of Jairus's daughter, 
when carefully examined, does not compel us 

1 The Beginnings of Christianity, Vol. I. (Eng. trans.) 
p. 97. 

139 



THE MODERN MIND 

to find in it an instance of resurrection from 
the dead. It may well have been that the 
disciples so regarded it, just as the eye- 
witnesses of the accident which befell Eu- 
tychus and his restoration to health, re- 
corded in the Acts, assumed that the young 
man was dead, in spite of Paul's words, 
" Trouble not yourselves, for his life is in 
him. ' ' x But the word of Jesus, which Luke 
represents as having been spoken after His 
entrance into the chamber, is decisive, " The 
child is not dead, but sleepeth. ' ' 2 Here we 
have a case of resuscitation from a trance, 
not resurrection from the spirit world. And 
this view is confirmed by the realistic touch 
of Christ's direction that the child should 
be given some food. 

The so-called " nature miracles " stand 
in a class by themselves. They are few in 
number, 3 and are not of equal religious Sig- 
nets xx, 9, 10. 2 Mark v, 39. 
8 Those in the primary sources are: The Feeding of 
the Five Thousand, The Walking on the Sea, and The 
Stilling of the Tempest. 

140 



RELIGION AND MIRACLE 

nificance with those to which no reasonable 
objection can be made. As Professor San- 
day remarks, " many a loyal Christian ac- 
cepts them as they stand, but with a note 
of interrogation." If they are to enter into 
our modern knowledge they must be con- 
ceived of in terms of our modern conscious- 
ness, and it may be that it is reserved for 
still further study to discover the substan- 
tial kernel of fact which lies within the shell 
of the narratives as they have come down 
to us. The most important of the " nature 
miracles " is the Feeding of the Five Thou- 
sand. It may be that the explanation of this 
wonder is to be found in the outburst of 
brotherly generosity provoked by the exam- 
ple of Jesus, so that each was able to share 
in the other's good. Or it may be that, as 
A. Schweitzer has recently explained, Jesus 
used the food which He and His disciples 
had brought with them, as the elements of a 
sacramental, Messianic meal, so that every 
one received a little after He had pronounced 

141 



THE MODERN MIND 

a blessing. This explanation finds some sup- 
port in the Messianic prophecy of the Old 
Testament of a feast or banquet which should 
be one of the accompaniments of the Messi- 
anic kingdom. There are some who will ob- 
ject, — In thus relating miracle to the idea of 
law does not the essence of the matter evap- 
orate? Is not the raison d'etre of a miracle 
its quality of indicating God's personal care 
for the individual? And if the upshot of 
the discussion is simply to leave us face 
to face with a network of laws, have we not 
lost something which our fathers had — a 
proof of the presence and power of a per- 
sonal God in the world? This is a feeling 
which disturbs earnest minds at the present 
time, and it springs out of a truly religious 
consciousness. The religious man feels that 
his relations with God must be vital, per- 
sonal, direct ; and in certain moods his imag- 
ination conceives of nature rather as a mask 
which conceals Deity than as an interpreter 
that reveals Him. Let us try to grapple with 

142 



RELIGION AND MIRACLE 

this difficulty. Suppose we could establish 
upon the most irrefragable basis the few 
nature miracles recorded in the Gospels, how 
could they help us to face those stretches of 
history and of our own experience where the 
reign of law is absolute and inviolable? The 
apparent indifference of nature to man's 
welfare is the standing rebuke administered 
by scepticism to the claims of faith. What- 
ever may have happened in the first century 
in Galilee, we know, alas ! that here and now 
the pestilence walks at noonday; the earth- 
quake sweeps to the same dreadful end the 
just and the unjust; the ship foundering on 
the sunken rock goes down into the swirling 
waters which drown alike the cries of inno- 
cence and of guilt. Such facts are among the 
difficulties of faith: but the answer to them 
cannot be found in the events of a far dis- 
tant past. 

Still further, the objection involves a du- 
alism which thought is ever striving to over- 
come. What are the laws of nature from a 

143 



THE MODERN MIND 

theistic standpoint but simply the rational 
principles by which God administers the 
world? The whole course of nature, as 
Lotze reminds us, becomes intelligible only 
by supposing the continual co-activity of 
God, who mediates the action and reaction 
going on between atom and atom, element 
and element. The laws or principles of the 
Divine action appear to operate uniformly, 
and thus exclude the notions of irrationality, 
caprice, or favouritism. In other words, 
within the limits of time and space, as a mor- 
tal being the individual is cared for, but not, 
it would seem, in a way which would be out 
of relation to the government of the world as 
a whole. Civilisation, culture, all the highest 
fruits of human activity, would be impossible 
without a stable universe ; and the pains and 
accidents which nature inflicts on man are 
the price he pays for this stability. If, 
indeed, the nature and activity of God were 
exhausted in His legislation for the physical 
universe there would be room for despair, 

144 



RELIGION AND MIRACLE 

for then nature might well present the as- 
pect of a dark and pitiless fate. But it is 
one of the great truths of religion that be- 
yond the sphere of the exactitudes of nat- 
ural law there is an infinite region of spirit 
and freedom where all souls can meet in per- 
sonal and unimpeded fellowship with the Fa- 
ther of spirits. 

To sum up, the wonder-working activity of 
Jesus enters into the most primitive ele- 
ments of the Gospel records. There is, 
therefore, a good sound historical tradition 
in their favour. The great majority of these 
wonders are in accordance with well-estab- 
lished analogies. It is unnecessary, there- 
fore, to assume that these acts are violations 
of the laws of nature. They may be de- 
scribed as due to the results, extraordinary 
or abnormal, of laws known or unknown. 
Moreover, too, they are deeds which are or- 
ganically related to the character of the 
worker and show us what manner of being 
Jesus was. To establish their historical 

145 



THE MODERN MIND 

soundness is to make the records in which 
they appear the more worthy of our belief. 
If we extend our view from the synoptic 
Gospels to the whole of the New Testament, 
it will be found that about eighty per cent, of 
the miracle stories have good historical au- 
thority and are in harmony with known 
analogies. The result of our discussion 
would seem to show that the true attitude 
to the stories of miracles in the New Testa- 
ment is not that of a sceptical dogmatism, — 
which is even more offensive to a liberal 
thinker than the dogmatism of faith, — but 
that of patient inquiry and a reverent wait- 
ing for further light. Fifty years ago it was 
the fashion to reject as utterly incredible 
many of the stories of Christ's wonder-work- 
ing power, stories which have since been 
abundantly and brilliantly vindicated. Hence 
the wise and cautious scholar will be slow to 
deny the authenticity of other incidents, in 
spite of the fact that to these our present 
knowledge can afford no analysis which we 

146 



RELIGION AND MIRACLE 

to-day accept. May it not be that further 
study will show to be facts other miracles 
in the Gospels which we cannot now ex- 
plain? 



147 



CHAPTER V 

THE PKOBLEM OF SUFFEKING IN THE LIGHT OF 
CHKISTIASTITY 

The problem of evil stands like a dark and 
sinister figure barring the path of faith. We 
are here concerned mainly with physical evil, 
which, though related to, is not identified 
with moral evil. Though in experience they 
intermingle and are sometimes even con- 
nected as cause and effect, they belong, nev- 
ertheless, to different orders and must not 
be confused. Ever since man arrived at 
self-reflection he has grappled with the 
dreadful fact of suffering. Out of the con- 
flict have come the greatest creations of 
genius, from the drama of Job and the plays 
of iEschylus to the Hamlet of Shakespeare. 
Because of it great religions have arisen and 
philosophic systems have been created. 

148 



THE PROBLEM OF SUFFERING 

Buddhism, which, to-day is the only rival 
of Christianity, is a theory of the origin and 
end of suffering. Its four noble truths — 
Pain, the Origin of Pain, the Destruction of 
Pain, the Eight-fold Holy Way that leads 
to the cessation of pain, — sum up the essence 
of Buddha's creed. In Nirvana the desire 
to live perishes. With it also perishes pain. 
Schopenhauer, who represents in the Western 
world the spirit of Buddhism, sees in pain 
the only permanent and positive element of 
experience, while all pleasures are fleeting, 
arising from the momentary satisfaction of 
desires that are never really satisfied. Hence 
his solution of the problem is : Renounce the 
will to live; exist as one dead to the world; 
and thus you will be free from the tor- 
ments which visit those who love or hate 
or wish. 

As the race advances in civilisation, it 
grows more and more sensitive to suffering, 
even as it grows more and more capable of 
suffering. The mystery darkens and deep- 

149 



THE MODERN MIND 

ens for every thoughtful mind. Scepticism 
finds in the prevalence, the meaningless dis- 
tribution, and the frequent uselessness of 
pain, its strongest argument against the ex- 
istence of a God perfect in love and power. 
It is said of Sir Leslie Stephen that he was 
" a rebel against pain, not on his own ac- 
count, for he stood his trials well, but in a 
Promethean man-loving spirit. The sight of 
the world's tragedy made him an agnostic." 1 
There are not a few like him, whose faith has 
been paralysed by some fell stroke of disease 
or death. 

I wish to look at the question of suffering 
in the light of the Christian religion. In 
this light the problem grows in difficulty and 
complexity. If the world were governed 
by an impersonal Force or Fate, then 
stoic resignation, heroic, unfailing endurance 
would be our truest attitude. But the mes- 
sage of Christ is, as we have seen, that at 

*W. Barry, quoted by T. I. Hardy, Gospel of Pain, 
p. 40. 

150 



THE PROBLEM OF SUFFERING 

the heart of the universe is love, love in its 
purest, most selfless form, the love of a Fa- 
ther. It is this love that has called into be- 
ing every human soul, watches over and 
sustains and guides it through the shadows 
of time into a blessed eternity. Lotze has 
gone to the very heart of Christ's thought 
of God when he says: " God is the living 
love that wills the happiness of all being." 
It is this thought which the Christian cannot 
let go though it is shaken to its very depths 
under the heavy blows of trial. His bewil- 
derment and confusion when pain befalls 
him, so far from being mitigated by the reli- 
gious traditions of his early training, are 
really aggravated by them, until in his de- 
spair he either abandons his faith or 
snatches at the latest spiritual nostrum 
which offers relief by drugging his power to 
think. Scarcely a day passes that I do not 
hear the misery-laden questions of men and 
women: " Why does God send this trouble 
into my life? " " Why has He made my 

151 



THE MODERN MIND 

wife an invalid? " " Why is my innocent 
child tortured in the agonies of an incurable 
disease? " " Why did God allow my loved 
one to be so racked with misery that he could 
find help only in a self-inflicted death? " 
" Why am I a victim of nervous wretched- 
ness and my life a prolonged conflict with 
the ghastly phantoms of imagination? " 
" Why has God taken from me the light of 
my eyes? " " Why have misfortune and 
disappointment dogged my footsteps all 
through life? " There are as many ques- 
tions as there are types of suffering in the 
world. A brilliant English novelist intro- 
duces us to the death-chamber of one of his 
characters, a pious man trained in the ordi- 
nary popular religious traditions. The dy- 
ing man is discoursing to those about him 
on his experience of God's dealing with 
him: 

" God's got a nasty trick of coming back upon 
us like a thunder-storm. Hell strike and you 11 
go on your knees and suffer and moan; and then 

152 



THE PROBLEM OF SUFFERING 

you'll think 'tis over and try to settle down and 
count the cost and make the best of it; but while 
you're just creeping out cautiously and hoping for 
better things, He's on the watch and strikes again 
perhaps and takes all that's left." 

11 The very image of His ways! " cried Philip. 
1 ' And be that a God to worship ? " ' 

To these bitter questionings two answers 
are made. The first is as old as the Book 
of Job. There are physical evils, it is said, 
but these exist because sin exists. God sends 
pain to the wicked as a penalty for their 
transgressions, and to the good man as a 
chastisement to wean him from some evil 
which still remains within him. The disci- 
plinary or instrumental theory of pain fails 
to satisfy. Where is the spiritual discipline, 
we may" well ask, in the abject poverty that 
crushes intellectual aspiration and makes a 
worthy human existence impossible, nay, 
that often erects insurmountable barriers 
between God and the soul? Tell me how mel- 
ancholia ministers to the moral needs of its 

1 Eden Philpotts: The Thief of Virtue. 
153 



THE MODERN MIND 

victim who feels that he is lost, an outcast 
from God, a man damned in this world, and 
like to be damned in the next. Explain the 
pedagogy of psychasthenia, which tortures 
the sufferer with a thousand grotesque, 
fantasmal fears, turns his life into a web 
of indecisions, perplexities, senseless im- 
pulses, and yet, with diabolic cunning, pre- 
serves some area of the mind untouched, so 
that the sufferer may have the added anguish 
of knowing that his inner world is out of 
joint and he is powerless to set it right. And 
yet pain, in some instances, as observation 
and experience testify, does strengthen and 
discipline character. Whether it does so or 
not, however, depends upon the type of char- 
acter on which it falls. Throughout every 
land in Christendom there are institutions 
built and consecrated to the work of inflicting 
pain for high moral ends. Let us hear the 
witness of one who was subjected for a time 
to this discipline: 1 

1 2he Ballad of Beading Gaol, by 0. 33 (Oscar Wilde). 

154 



THE PROBLEM OF SUFFERING 

1 ' The vilest deeds like poison weeds 

Bloom well in prison air: 
It is only what is good in man 

That wastes and withers there : 
Pale Anguish keeps the heavy gate, 

And the Warder is Despair. " 

Nevertheless it remains true that in certain 
instances pain has the power to mature some 
latent spiritual germ, to touch the human 
spirit to finer issues of peace and goodness, 
to turn the limitations and weaknesses of the 
body into a means of spiritual strength and 
growth. It is this triumph of the mind over 
body, of the soul over suffering, that gives 
evidence of a spiritual life whose roots go 
down into the invisible and eternal world. 
It speaks to us of immortality. Pain, then, 
while in itself an evil, may be transmuted 
into good. 

To-day an ancient attempt to solve the 
mystery is once more coming into vogue. It 
has created a new religion and a new Church, 
which are among the strangest phenomena 
of the age. Christian Science gets rid of 

155 



THE MODERN MIND 

the problem by simply denying its existence. 
Sin and suffering are alike unreal. Deny 
them, and they cease to be. Do you speak 
of pulmonary tuberculosis as the work of a 
micro-organism discovered by one Koch in 
1882, which invades the lungs, and sets up a 
morbid process that unless checked ends in 
the utter ruin of that organ? " You are 
suffering from a widespread delusion," re- 
sponds the Christian Scientist. " The bacil- 
lus of which you talk has no existence. It 
is simply one of the protean forms which 
Mortal Mind assumes; but Mortal Mind is 
itself an illusion, a nonenity. The bacillus, 
therefore, is an illusion of an illusion." It 
is enough to reply that disease is just as real 
or as unreal as health, no more and no less. 
Health is a certain condition of the organ- 
ism. Disease is a certain other condition. 
Both are real or unreal. Christian Scien- 
tists, to be logical, should deny the reality 
of both — in which case all argument ceases, 
and every tongue is paralysed. 

156 



THE PROBLEM OF SUFFERING 

The truth is, reflection convinces us that 
the ultimate reason of suffering is inscrut- 
able, and we will refuse to juggle with words, 
or to believe that at last the heart of the 
mystery has been plucked out. Is relief, 
then, impossible? Must faith still continue 
to bear its intolerable burden? On any 
hypothesis the mystery is dark and terrible 
enough ; but it is made darker and still more 
terrible by traditional notions that have 
never been challenged and compelled to give 
an account of themselves. What hurts the 
pious heart is not so much the suffering as 
the sad conviction that it is God who inflicts 
it, and that not the slightest sign of a pur- 
pose or of a rational explanation can be dis- 
cerned in the infliction. In prayer and hymn 
and sermon, in our ordinary religious speech 
and writing, the assumption is that God is 
directly responsible for all the evil that we 
suffer. He it is who sends earthquake and 
fire upon a crowded city, and the aged, the 
innocent and the helpless are burned to 

157 



THE MODERN MIND 

death, or driven from their shelter to suffer 
hardship and misery, to face the tasks of 
life with impaired faculties and exhausted 
resources. From Him comes the gale that 
wrecks the ship and hurls to death her living 
freight, drowning alike the cries of inno- 
cence and of guilt. Enter one of our hos- 
pitals and see the gratuitous agony that 
makes life intolerable, agony that is dry and 
barren, pain void of all spiritual fruit ! Pass 
into a retreat for the mental wrecks of hu- 
manity, and mark how melancholia or mania 
graves its pitiful anguish on the face; how 
horror and despair make of human life a 
hell, turn it into a death in life ! Who is re- 
sponsible for these things? God is the 
author of all these horrors ; and at the very 
thought the heart faints and fails within us. 
But let us reflect. Disease and suffering be- 
long to the natural order. They are things 
of the stage on which the moral drama of 
our lives is played out, and which we call 
" Nature/ ' Here we cannot speak of good- 

158 



THE PROBLEM OF SUFFERING 

ness or badness, love or hate, kindness or 
cruelty. Nature is neither moral nor im- 
moral: she is simply non-moral. Go where 
you will throughout this universe, from our 
planet swimming in the wastes of space, to 
the utmost bounds of Orion and the Pleiades, 
and you will sink in despairing awe before 
the manifestations of power and beauty and 
majesty. But nowhere will you discover the 
minutest trace of a moral nature, of a heart 
able to pity or to bless. 



a 



Lo, these are but the outskirts of His ways : 
And how small a whisper do we hear of Him ! 
But the thunder of His power who can under- 
stand? "* 



Where, then, shall we find a revelation of 
God's deepest feelings toward us, of his real 
attitude to pain and misery? First of all, 
in our own souls. Why is it that we see in 
suffering a challenge to relieve it? Why does 
the good physician dislike the word " incur- 
able " and inch by inch will fight with death 

1 Jobxxvi, 14. 
159 



THE MODERN MIND 

to the bitter end? Why do we cry out at 
the spectacle of an innocent child writhing in 
the grasp of some loathsome disorder? It 
is the great heart of our common nature that 
so feels and speaks. But whence is this 
heart? From what deep abyss does this love 
well up eternally, to face the sin and sorrow 
and pain of the world? "Where are the 
springs that renew it everlastingly and keep 
it fresh and pure and strong? Surely the 
answer is : This love comes out of the Eter- 
nal, straight from the great heart of the 
Father in Heaven, who, in us and through us 
as His organs, is in everlasting conflict with 
the evil and the misery that resist His will. 
If ever we are tempted to doubt God's love, 
we have but to look into our own hearts 
when moved by some pure and noble emo- 
tion, to find enough to paralyse our scepti- 
cism and to fire us with a new and living 
faith. 

Here, then, in the noblest, the most unself- 
ish impulses within us, we are to read God's 

160 



THE PROBLEM OF SUFFERING 

real attitude towards suffering. Whatever 
the perplexities about its origin and mean- 
ing, we must believe that so far from God's 
being the author of suffering, He stands op- 
posed to it, hates it with a perfect hatred, 
opposes His infinite energies to it that He 
may vanquish it; but the God who pities 
suffers with the being pitied. The larger 
the love, the more sacrificial it must be. The 
prophet of the Exile uttered a profounder 
truth than he suspected when he said, " In 
all their affliction He was afflicted. ' ' * Our 
human tragedy, then, is not played before an 
idle, or powerless, or indifferent spectator. 
Rather does He step down from His highest 
heaven, mingles with the dust and evil of 
our lower world, shares, in ways incompre- 
hensible to us, in our pain and wretchedness. 
We can hear, as it were, His consoling voice : 
" Oh ye who despair, I grieve with you. Yes ? 
it is I who grieve in you. Your sorrow is 
Mine. No pang of your finitude but is Mine 

1 Isaiah lxiii, 9. 

161 



THE MODERN MIND 

too; I suffer it all, for all things are Mine; 
I bear it, and yet I triumph." 1 

Is it objected that the ascription of human 
emotion to the Deity is the baldest anthropo- 
morphism? Well, we must be anthropomor- 
phic if we are to speak of God at all. 
How can we get outside ourselves and 
think or speak of God apart from the struct- 
ural principles of our nature? What- 
ever super-personal qualities may be in 
God — and doubtless there are such — there 
must be also in Him motives of action corre- 
sponding to what is highest in our own ex- 
perience. To say that there are no such mo- 
tives is to say that God can neither think nor 
will nor love. Hence the only alternative to 
belief in a God who sympathises with us and 
is involved in the vicissitudes of our moral 
lot is agnosticism — the belief that, though 
there may be a God, we are forever shut out 
from knowing anything whatever about Him. 
Both positions are beliefs and we must decide 

a Koyce: The Spirit of Modern Philosophy, p. 470. 

162 



THE PROBLEM OF SUFFERING 

for one or the other. Surely we are justified 
in deciding for the one that best harmonises 
our experience, that best ministers to the 
needs of life. 

When we turn to the life and death of the 
Son of Man we find indeed as little on the 
doctrine of suffering as on the doctrine of 
sin. Jesus Christ is no speculative philoso- 
pher, no metaphysical thinker, offering a 
final solution of world problems ; and infinite 
harm has been often done by so conceiving 
Him. He is the teacher of an ethical reli- 
gion, and He brings home to men the thought 
of God in simple human terms. He speaks 
primarily to man — not the thinker — but the 
moral personality called to battle with the 
forces of evil and thereby to achieve his des- 
tiny. Take, then, Christ's life and work as 
a whole, and we see in them, as in a mirror, 
ultimate spiritual reality, the reflection of a 
God who hates pain, sickness, and death, as 
He hates cruelty, meanness, and lust. On the 
other hand, be it noted, Christ does not ex- 

163 



THE MODERN MIND 

plain away the fact of suffering after the 
manner of modern mind-curers. His view is 
sane, rational, and in close touch with expe- 
rience. To Him all suffering is a reality, 
the sign of an evil power at work in the 
world. But the Divine love is a greater re- 
ality, a mighty sun, filling the whole earth 
with gladness, and consuming with its burn- 
ing heat the dark clouds of sin and sorrow. 
Filled with this love, He interprets it to 
men, not in word only, but also in saving 
deeds. " Therefore did He consecrate Him- 
self to the miserable, the sick, and the poor, 
but not as a moralist, and without a trace 
of soft sentimentality. He does not divide 
evils into types and classes. He does not 
ask whether the sick man deserves to be 
healed. He is, moreover, far from sympa- 
thising with pain or with death. He says 
nowhere that disease is wholesome and mis- 
chief healthy. No — He calls sickness sick- 
ness, and health health. All evil, all misery, 
is to Him something frightful. It belongs 

164 



THE PROBLEM OF SUFFERING 

to the great kingdom of Satan. But He feels 
the power of the Saviour within Him. ' ' * To 
the eye of Christ, this world is the sphere 
of two kingdoms — the kingdom of God, and 
the kingdom of evil. To the kingdom of God 
belong joy, peace, order, self-control, blessed- 
ness, holiness of mind and body; to the king- 
dom of evil belong sin, pain, disorder, mis- 
ery, sickness, death. As the founder of God's 
kingdom He stands in irrevocable antago- 
nism to the kingdom of evil. Hence He for- 
gave sins ; healed the sick ; brought peace to 
the troubled mind; filled the despairing with 
new hope, and brought to the outcast the 
companionship of God. Wherever He saw 
want, physical or moral, it was a challenge 
to the mighty forces within Him. He lav- 
ished freely on human need all the resources 
of His own peerless nature ; and as He did so 
a new thought of God dawned upon minds 
long fettered by the bonds of a hard and un- 
spiritual religion. It was as though He 

1 Harnack: Das Wesen des Christentums, p. 39. 

165 



THE MODERN MIND 

would say: " God is not the author of these 
pains and griefs that burden you. He is 
life and love, the eternal Source of the heal- 
ing, blissful, and uplifting energies in the 
universe. What I do in time and on this 
earth, God is doing eternally throughout His 
entire creation. The Father worketh even 
until now, and I work. ' ' * But Christ could 
not cure sorrow without bearing it first upon 
His own heart. The ages have agreed to call 
Him " The Man of Sorrows.' ' By a Divine 
alchemy He turned suffering and trial into 
an instrument of good, and is Himself the 
most sublime illustration of how pain, borne 
vicariously — the pains of the martyr dying 
for the truth, the tears and sorrows of a 
mother's heart for her erring son, all the 
heart-breaking travail of the innocent for the 
guilty — cease to be evils, become the points 
at which the soul shines with unearthly glory 
and shows the God within. In the presence 
of sorrows such as these we melt in peni- 

1 John v, 17. 

166 



THE PROBLEM OF SUFFERING 

tence; we are cleansed from sin, feel our- 
selves ennobled and dignified. The suffer- 
ings of the just are the saving element in his- 
tory. But this is pre-eminently true of the 
Holy One who lays down His life for the 
unholy. We may criticise this or that doc- 
trine, but we must bow before a fact of expe- 
rience. And here is a fact — Christ's suffer- 
ing is a redeeming power. It rescues us 
from the grasp of the finite and the transi- 
tory. It helps to a pure and holy life. It 
makes us sure of eternal blessedness, gives 
us a heart of flesh for a heart of stone, and 
endows us with the joyful certainty that God 
has forgiven us our sins and dwells with- 
in us, the secret of all good. Thus has 
God overruled the forces that put His 
Son to death, and has made them the in- 
strument of blessing and redemption for 
humanity. 

But it may be said : Suffering, for all that 
has been urged, is still a fact. It belongs to 
the order of the world, which ultimately rests 

167 



THE MODERN MIND 

on the Divine will. If God does not directly 
cause the misfortunes and calamities that 
befall man, they are here, nevertheless, by 
His permission. True; but from the stand- 
point of religion the distinction is vital. It 
is one thing to say that God permits them 
and even uses them, but a very different 
thing to say that God directly causes them. 
" A father sending his son into the school 
playground knows that many a cut and 
bruise will befall him — a broken bone, per- 
haps, or an infectious disease — the end in 
view is worthy of the risk. But it would in- 
volve a very different kind of father to give 
the child intentionally a cut or bruise or 
break one of his bones or infect him with dis- 
ease, and very much the kind of father who 
would lead his son into vice. ' ' 1 Suffering 
is here, but God uses it for His own ends. 
It exists in a sense by His will, just as sin 
exists by His will ; but sin and suffering alike 
are opposed to God's deepest will; and 

1 The Christ that is to Be, p. 109. 
168 



THE PROBLEM OF SUFFERING 

Christ's boundless optimism prophesies of 
the day when they will pass like dreadful 
phantoms of the night and God will fill every 
heart with the cloudless sunshine of His love. 



169 



CHAPTEE VI 

THE NEW BELIEF IN PBAYER 

Auguste Sabatier has profoundly remarked 
that prayer is real religion; so that to write 
the history of prayer would be to write the 
history of religion. Like all great spiritual 
ideas, such as love and sacrifice and immor- 
tality, prayer started from the very humblest 
beginnings; and, like them, its true value is 
to be judged not by its earliest, but by its 
latest stages. The historical origin of 
prayer, how man first learned to pray, is one 
of the hardest problems in the study of hu- 
man development. Modern students of eth- 
nology point us to the magic spell as in all 
probability the first discernible germ of 
prayer. We open the graves of neolithic 
man and find amulets and mystic symbols 
and talismans, objects by means of which 
he sought to bend the will of super- 

170 



THE NEW BELIEF IN PRAYER 

natural powers to his desires. Here the 
modern savage may be taken as a repre- 
sentative of prehistoric man. The savage 
stands over against the unseen agencies 
that surround him, and commands them to 
do his bidding, by incantation and repetition 
of mystic names and phrases. He would, as 
it were, project his will to constrain the Di- 
vinity to obedience. But as the thought of 
God deepens, as His greatness and majesty 
possess the mind, the worshipper feels, by 
contrast, his own littleness, and he no longer 
seeks to work a spell; he falls prostrate, as 
a suppliant, and prays. For ages the spell 
ritual and the prayer ritual existed side by 
side, until gradually the more spiritual 
minds turned from magic as a violation of 
the true relation of man to God, and thus 
progressed from spell to prayer. Yet even 
in the darkness of barbarism gleams of 
higher light astonish the investigator, as, for 
example, the closing words of a prayer of 
the Khonds of Northern India: " Oh Lord, 

171 



THE MODERN MIND 

we know not what is good for ns. Thou 
knowest what it is. For it we pray." Every 
fresh discovery that lays bare ancient civili- 
sations is a witness to the universality of the 
prayer instinct. Egyptian papyri, Baby- 
lonian tablets, the sacred books of India, 
Persia, China, and Japan are crowded with 
prayers. 

With one notable exception, the higher re- 
ligions are built on prayer. The exception is 
Buddhism, which, believing that human life 
is under the inviolable order of Karma, has 
no room for prayer, and for it substitutes 
meditation. Buddha is reported to have said 
that " all prayers are vain repetitions. " His 
eight-fold path, which leads to redemption, 
consists of right belief, right resolve, right 
word, right act, right life, right effort, right 
thinking, right meditation. There is no 
room here for prayer, first because Buddha 
knew no God to whom he could pray. The 
Brahmanical deities and ceremonies had be- 
come to him quite incredible. And secondly, 

172 



THE NEW BELIEF IN PRAYER 

because the essence of prayer is the feeling 
of dependence, and on what can the soul de- 
pend in a universe which is itself a stupen- 
dous illusion? A modern poet is true to the 
creed of Buddha when he makes him ad- 
dress his disciples thus : 

11 Pray not. The darkness will not light. Ask 
Nought from the silence, for it cannot speak ! 
Vex not your mournful mind with pious pains. 
Ah! Brothers, Sisters, seek 
Nought from the helpless gods by gift or hymn, 
Nor bribe with blood, nor feed with fruit and 

cakes. 
Within yourselves deliverance must be sought, 
Each man his present makes. 
Ye suffer from yourselves, none else compels, 
None other holds you that ye live and die, 
And whirl upon the wheel of change and turn 
Its spokes of agony. ' ' 1 

Yet the instincts of human nature could not 
be permanently suppressed. Buddhism was 
swept from India, and wherever it still 
reigns as a popular faith the images and rel- 
ics of the great teacher are the objects of 
religious devotion. The later popular forms 

a Sir Edwin Arnold: The Light of Asia (Bk. 8). 

173 



THE MODERN MIND 

of this faith return, however, to the practice 
of prayer. It is curious to note that Chris- 
tian Science, in its pantheistic piety, sets 
aside prayer, in the traditional sense, in fa- 
vour of a declaration of unity with the in- 
finite substance of the universe. The in- 
tenser the theistic consciousness, the more 
prominent does prayer become. In Moham- 
medanism, for example, prayer occupies 
even a larger, or, at least, a more obvious 
place than in Christianity. When the muez- 
zin calls the hour for prayer, the toiler in 
the field, the boatman on the river, the clerk 
in his office drops his task, spreads his car- 
pet, bows reverently to the ground, and of- 
fers up his prayer. Indeed, one may say 
that nothing strikes the traveller in the East 
more than its unity in prayer amid discord 
in all else. 

What does this universality of prayer 
mean? Is it that man is the victim of a deep- 
seated delusion? That through endless time 
he has been sending messages into empty 

174 



THE NEW BELIEF IN PRAYER 

space, to find as his sole answer the echo of 
his own voice? If so, then indeed his Maker 
has put him to permanent moral confusion. 
Rather would we say that prayer, in all its 
long and chequered history, is the response 
of man to the impact of the Divine person- 
ality upon him, mediated by a thousand in- 
fluences, now of nature, and again, of social 
life; and yet again, through prophetic souls 
moved with immediate intuition of things 
spiritual. All the arguments of formal logic 
may seem to be against prayer, but the pri- 
mal instincts of the soul cry out, and will 
not be silenced. 

We are witnessing at the present time a 
resurgence of faith in prayer. It is not too 
much to say that this instinct, which for a 
generation and more has suffered a great 
eclipse, chiefly through the absorbing inter- 
est in the natural sciences and the critical 
temper which they produce, is now at length 
reasserting itself and is coming to its own. 
The causes of this rebirth of prayer are 

175 



THE MODERN MIND 

fairly obvious. There is, first of all, the new 
interest in religion, manifesting itself in a 
widespread feeling that religion is not 
merely concerned with a supernatural world 
or with preparation for the life after death, 
but has a vital bearing on our health and 
happiness here and now. As prayer is of 
the very essence of religion, it rises and falls 
with religion. A no less potent cause is the 
remarkable development in the science of 
psychology, which is strongly engaging the 
attention of the popular mind. Twenty 
years ago the study of the human soul and 
its processes was regarded as an interesting 
academic exercise devoid of any discernible 
practical good. To-day, chiefly through the 
writings of such men as F. W. H. Myers, Dr. 
William James, and a host of lesser men, 
the educated and even the semi-educated 
world has become convinced that mind is a 
much more mysterious thing than had been 
supposed, and has powers hitherto unsus- 
pected to work good or ill in our daily life. 

176 



THE NEW BELIEF IN PRAYER 

Prayer implies a certain attitude of soul 
which has its psychic equivalents, and these 
equivalents, as we now know, react on the 
physical organism. 

The latest philosophy, pragmatism by 
name, which witnesses to a revolt against 
transcendental and intellectualistic systems 
such as that of Hegel and his British fol- 
lowers, and a return to a more practical and 
ethical way of regarding things, favours the 
religious attitude toward life, and finds the 
imperishable foundations of religion in the 
inmost nature of the human soul. The prag- 
matist asks of an idea or a doctrine: " Does 
it work? What value has it for our con- 
crete life? " Now, prayer is the highest 
mode of spiritual energising which we know, 
and achieves results in life. This very fact, 
from the modern point of view, vindicates its 
truth and legitimacy. 

Here, then, it would seem, is the invincible 
argument for the validity of prayer. It is 
a cause. It creates changes. It produces 

177 . 



THE MODERN MIND 

phenomena. It takes its place beside other 
substantial realities of experience. There 
is not a mission in any of our great cities 
which cannot point to cases of men and 
women apparently lost to all good, sunken in 
vice and degradation, from whom, under the 
influence of prayer, evil habits have fallen 
off like soiled garments, and in whom it 
would seem as if something had died, giving 
birth to a new spirit, a new outlook on life 
and the world, a new order of conduct. 1 
" Prayer," says Jowett, " is the summing 
up of the Christian life in a definite act which 
is at once inward and outward, the power 
of which on the character, like that of any 
other act, is proportioned to its intensity. 
The imagination of doing rightly adds little 
to our strength. Even the wish to do so is 
not necessarily accompanied by a change of 
heart. But in prayer we imagine, and wish, 
and perform, all in one. Our imperfect reso- 

1 For two striking illustrations see Begbie: Twice 
Born Men, pp. 142 seq.; pp. 165 seq. 

178 



THE NEW BELIEF IN PRAYER 

lutions are offered up to God; our weakness 
becomes strength; our words, deeds." x Why 
can prayer achieve these great things, re- 
move these mountains that stand between 
man and the true goal of existence? Reli- 
gion answers, and rightly answers : The ulti- 
mate cause is God. There is in all prayer a 
mystic element which defies analysis and 
which cannot be described. Here faith and 
feeling come to their rights. Religion, and 
therefore prayer, without mysticism would 
be quite powerless to answer the deepest 
needs of the soul. But while on its Divine 
side prayer is not open to explanation, 
on its human side it can be regarded 
as a psychological fact, like any other ac- 
tivity of mind. Its nature, its achievements, 
the conditions of its fruitful exercise, the 
limitations within which it moves, may to 
some extent be understood; and the under- 
standing of these things, so far from weak- 

1 Interpretation of Scripture and Other Essays, pp. 330, 
331. 

179 



THE MODERN MIND 

ening, will stimulate him who prays to 
still greater devotion, by convincing him 
that in praying he is not dealing with 
the phantoms of imagination, but with 
real energies which work like other ener- 
gies, in harmony with the order of the 
universe. 

Perhaps the greatest difficulty which 
thoughtful minds have felt as to the reality 
of prayer has arisen in connection with the 
modern scientific conception of nature as the 
realm of inviolable law. The three men in 
the nineteenth century who have written 
most profoundly upon the subject of prayer 
— Schleiermacher, F. W. Eobertson, and 
Mar tine au — were never able to overcome ab- 
solutely the scientific hindrance to an ade- 
quate treatment of their theme. They di- 
vided the world of reality into two great 
departments or realms: the realm of exter- 
nal, physical nature, in which inviolable 
necessity rules, and the realm of the soul, 
the home of freedom and spontaneity. As 

180 



THE NEW BELIEF IN PRAYER 

Martineau puts it: " The physical is gov- 
erned from without; the spiritual can gov- 
ern itself. The former is subject to the same 
fixed laws that prevail in other parts of the 
organised world. The latter is a centre of 
individual power which issues its own deter- 
minations. No act of will can protect the 
body amidst present pestilence, but holy 
resolution will fortify the soul against temp- 
tation." As a sign of the changed attitude 
of modern thought on this matter, we have 
only to cite the words of a well-known living 
philosopher : 

" Even the most strictly mechanical view of the 
world-order must admit that prayer may under cer- 
tain circumstances have an important effect in modi- 
fying the course of physical events. Indeed, within 
certain limits not easy to be fixed, the more strict 
and minute the tenure of the principle of mechan- 
ism, the more sure and widespread becomes the 
physical influence of the subjective attitude of 
prayer. Especially does this conception connect to- 
gether, in terms of some comprehensive theory of 
relations, all the phenomena of human conscious- 
ness and certain correlated changes in the bodily 
mechanism. No most interior, unheard whisper, or 

181 



THE MODERN MIND 

even muttered thought of a prayer, could then fail 
of its record in some corresponding physical 
event. ' ' 1 

In these last sentences the writer calls at- 
tention to the fruitful commonplace of psy- 
chology, that mind and body constitute a 
unity, that for every thought and feeling, 
however slight, there is a corresponding 
nervous event. The emotion of faith which 
accompanies genuine prayer has a reflex ac- 
tion on the nervous organism. 

There is, however, a truth in the older con- 
tention which Christians generally are begin- 
ning to acknowledge. Modern science has 
graven deep in our minds the thought that 
the world is ruled by general laws and that 
these laws are inviolable. It is true that we 
do not know why Grod so administers the 
world, but that He does so is an induction 
from a wide range of facts. "We must also 
believe that if there is a universal mind ex- 
pressed in these laws, we are justified in in- 

1 Ladd : Philosophy of Religion, Vol. II, pp. 377-378. 

182 



THE NEW BELIEF IN PRAYER 

ferring that, on the whole, it is best for us 
that the world should be so governed. The 
inexorableness of nature, which bears hard 
on the individual at times, is, after all, bet- 
ter than the chaos which would come if ca- 
price or favouritism were lord of the uni- 
verse. Therefore, the pious man will not 
pray for a violation or suspension of any of 
those fixed expressions of the Divine will 
which we call ' ' the laws of nature. ' ' A true 
instinct warns us not to pray that the law 
of gravitation may cease to operate when we 
pass by, nor to pray that the moon should 
fail to attract the tides, nor to ask that the 
buried dead should rise from their graves. 
Prayers for changes in the weather held 
their ground much longer than other indis- 
criminating forms of petition, because peo- 
ple did not realise that the apparent irregu- 
larities of the weather are as much the re- 
sult of fixed laws as the revolution of our 
earth around the sun or the rise and fall of 
the tides. 

183 



THE MODERN MIND 

On the other hand, we know that no man 
has ever prayed sincerely without effecting 
changes in his character that otherwise would 
never have taken place; and unless all the 
teaching of modern physiological psychology 
be false, no man can affect his character 
without affecting his nervous system, and 
through the nervous system his entire phys- 
ical organism. It thus appears that Mar- 
tineau's dualism has been vanquished at the 
point where its injurious effects would most 
be felt. 

Psychology has done much to vindicate 
the reasonableness of prayer by co-ordinat- 
ing it with other familiar phenomena of our 
mental life. For example, some of the work- 
ings of prayer are analogous to the results 
brought about by suggestion and self-sug- 
gestion. A man, let us suppose, prays, and 
invites others to pray with him, that he may 
have strength to overcome the craving for 
alcohol. These petitions act as powerful 
suggestions, which, if they are continued long 

184 



THE NEW BELIEF IN PRAYER 

enough, and assuming that there is no seri- 
ous lesion of the brain, will accomplish the 
desired result. We know, too, that prayer 
under certain conditions has in cases of sick- 
ness a therapeutic efficacy. The lives of 
great religious personalities such as Augus- 
tine, Francis of As si si, and Luther, and the 
growth of faith-healing and prayer-healing 
cults in our own time, offer such abundant 
proof that only ignorance and prejudice can 
any longer affect to doubt the reality of the 
alleged phenomena. Luther believed that 
his prayers saved from death four persons — 
himself, his wife Katherine, and his two in- 
timate friends, Myconius and Melancthon. 
Myconius was at the last gasp when a letter 
in which Luther told him how he was pray- 
ing for him, had such a powerful effect that 
he regained his strength and survived the re- 
former by about five years. Melancthon, 
who was stricken with a serious illness at 
Weimar in 1540, and was, indeed, given up 
to die, received such a powerful impulse 

185 



THE MODERN MIND 

from Luther's personal presence, strong 
faith, and earnest supplication that he, too, 
came back from the edge of the grave. Mod- 
ern history is not without similar instances 
of the power of prayer. At all times, Chris- 
tians, and many persons who would not claim 
the name, have shared the experience of 
Goethe, who, in his Wilhelm Meister, says, 
' i whenever I have sought the aid of Heaven 
in moments of distress and sorrow, I have 
never failed to find relief. " It is difficult to 
believe that such a faith, which still main- 
tains itself in spite of the most powerful an- 
tagonistic influences, can be based upon a 
hallucination. 

From a psychological point of view, many 
of these prayers may receive at least an 
approximate explanation as a reaction of 
the subconscious element in mind. As yet no 
satisfactory definition of the subconscious 
has been reached. But the facts go to show 
that states of thought may exist without our 
being aware of them, and give rise to intense 

186 



THE NEW BELIEF IN PRAYER 

emotions, and even build up complex struc- 
tures of imagination, as in Flournoy's classic 
case of Mile. Helene Smith, who in a subcon- 
scious condition was able to describe the 
planet Mars, and even communicate the lan- 
guage of its inhabitants. The most recent 
medical authorities speak of diseases of the 
subconscious, such as multiple personality, 
neurasthenia, psychasthenia, hysteria, and 
psycho-epilepsy. 

Now, the joy, the peace, the sense of over- 
flowing satisfaction characteristic of some 
prayers, are also marks of the subconscious 
activity. To give up conscious effort, to re- 
lax the strain of attention, to fall back upon 
the subconscious factor, is to feel a sense of 
relief, of unity with one's self, which reacts 
favourably on mind and body. Dr. James 
has recently called attention to the power of 
prayer to release pent-up energies, to sweep 
away inhibitions, with resultant increase of 
freedom and ability in our lives. Coleridge 
has said that the mass of learned men can- 

187 



THE MODERN MIND 

not pray. Their lives are all the poorer on 
account of the critical inhibition. Learning 
of itself does not necessarily make a great 
personality; and it is significant that the 
men in our own time who have impressed all 
who came under their influence as tremen- 
dous forces, have been men of prayer. Such, 
for example, were Gladstone and Bismarck x 
and General Gordon. It would seem as if 
the natural energies of these men, great as 
they were, found re-enforcement through 
contact with powers greater and holier than 
they. If this be so, must it not follow that 
the resurrection of belief in prayer to-day 
will raise the effectiveness of the average 
person and make him of greater value to the 

1 Bismarck writes thus to his wife: "You may be as- 
sured that for a long time I have been helping you 
with my prayers that the Lord may deliver you from 
all unnecessary depression, and give you a heart full 
of cheerful reliance on God, and the same also to me. 
And I am confident that He will hear us and guide us 
both on the way that leads to Him; even though yours 
should sometimes turn the mountain on the left and 
mine on the right, they will after all meet again be- 
hind it." 

188 



THE NEW BELIEF IN PRAYER 

Church and to the world? It is here that 
the man of affairs, the " practical man," 
as he loves to call himself, registers some- 
times a silent objection. To him, prayer 
seems a loss of time, when time is so pre- 
cious. He reverses the old monastic saying, 
" Or are est labor are/' " To pray is to 
work" — and says instead, " Labor are est 
orare, n " To work is to pray." And the 
Church sometimes listens to his voice. Liv- 
ing societies of Christians at the present 
time are feeling the breath of a new spirit 
of philanthropy. The enthusiasm of hu- 
manity is being poured out afresh. The 
world's pain and sorrow move us intensely, 
and we are busy in forming clubs, in building 
parish houses, in helping the sick, in instruct- 
ing the ignorant, in clothing the naked. The 
institutional Church has done great things, 
and is the outcome of one of the noblest tend- 
encies of the time. And yet it is shadowed 
by a subtle danger. The practical man, in 
ignoring the ideal and the spiritual, or in 

189 



THE MODERN MIND 

relegating them to the background, is really 
injuring the quantity and quality of his 
work. Many of our Church activities are 
fussy and shallow simply because they lack 
the consecrating and deepening touch of 
prayer. Matthew Arnold never ceased 
warning the England of his day against the 
fatal power of machinery to engross the 
mind, so that the man becomes a slave to 
the product of his hands. In the long run, it 
is the spiritual quality of work that tells, 
and this is derived through contact with the 
Source of all power and sanctity. Just as, 
for bodily health, cessation from work is as 
necessary as work itself, that our body may 
be recharged with vital energy and that 
fresh currents of power may pass along the 
jaded nerves, so, if the soul is to achieve 
great things, is to create phenomena that 
are real and not merely a seeming, it 
must withdraw from external activities 
and renew its energies in contact with the 
Divine. 

190 



THE NEW BELIEF IN PRAYER 

It is here that the question may be raised : 
Does not this view rob prayer of its 
real worth? If its efficacy depends simply 
on the operation of psychic laws, where is 
there room for a personal God Who 
hears and answers the cries of His 
children? Now, it is quite true that, 
if it were generally believed that the whole 
transaction begins and ends in our own 
minds, the practice would soon die out. A 
drama, if it satisfies our aesthetic sense, may 
live on, though its heroes and events are no 
longer credited. But once a religion ceases 
to be believed in, it is doomed. It is, how- 
ever, an unreal antithesis which sets God and 
law over against each other. It is analogous 
to the dilemma some would create between 
evolution and creation. The antithesis is 
dissolved if we reflect that there must be 
some ultimate source from which the mind 
draws its spiritual energy. Thus answers to 
prayer need not be interpreted as " miracu- 
lous " in the sense of violations of law, but 

191 



THE MODERN MIND 

as the results of the working of laws familiar 
to us in other phenomena. 

To discover that prayer is subject to law 
is not to divest it of its power and validity, 
but rather to root it amid the ultimate reali- 
ties and mysteries of experience. If there 
is an Infinite Spirit with whom our finite 
spirits are in communion, as all who pray 
believe, it follows that the result of the 
prayer, whatever it may be, is the action of 
this Spirit. 

With the evolution of man's spiritual con- 
sciousness, prayer has gradually been puri- 
fied of its grosser elements. It is true that 
some of these elements still remain as, sur- 
vivals of the earlier stage in the prayers of 
the immature. But, as a rule^ our prayers 
become more and more spiritualised as life 
develops. " It would be," says Professor 
Herrmann of Marburg, the writer who in 
our time has discussed the subject most 
deeply, " a shameful misuse of prayer if 
trifles which have no real significance for our 

192 



THE NEW BELIEF IN PRAYER 

inner life were to be made the objects of our 
prayers. A prayer offered in such a traf- 
ficking fashion would be, as it were, empty 
talk." * It is a commonplace of modern psy- 
chology that our real selves are by nature 
social. The purification of prayer has ad- 
vanced through the impulse to the establish- 
ment of a grander and more satisfying self 
or personality, and this is achieved more and 
more by conceiving God in terms of social 
relationship as " Our Father in Heaven," or 
as the Great Companion, or as a Loving 
Friend. 

Communion with God as thus the embodi- 
ment of our highest ideals and aspirations 
has more and more thrust into the back- 
ground impersonal ways of appeal and non- 
religious needs. The petitions of the child 
and of primitive man are for material goods. 
The prayers of the mature mind are for in- 
ward peace, spiritual uplift, for oneness with 
the Divine, for power to do the work of life. 

1 Communion of the Christian with God. Book 3, ch. 6. 

193 



THE MODERN MIND 

The desire for these inner spiritual goods 
marks the death of the old type of prayer, 
which sought to achieve its ends by magic 
and which sprang from the impotence of the 
natural man face to face with the forces of 
nature and stresses of life. And yet the deep 
feeling of the religious consciousness cannot 
let go the thought that God is interested in 
the fortunes of men, and that in some way, 
in answer to prayer, He can remove the bar- 
riers which hinder a sense of His nearness, 
and check the free play of that yearning for 
His spirit which is the beginning and end of 
the religious life. 



194 



CHAPTER VII 

PRAYER : DIFFICULTIES AKD METHODS 

There are many who find themselves in 
agreement with the positions taken in the 
preceding chapter and admit the blessedness 
and reality of prayer, and yet must sadly 
confess that they are constrained and per- 
plexed when they try to pray. If prayer is 
a natural, spontaneous instinct of the soul, 
it is also, as Luther said, an art. Just as 
there are born painters, musicians, poets, so 
there are born pray-ers. 1 It is, therefore, 
not to be wondered at that many pray with 
the feeling that their prayers bring little or 
no help and, indeed, are hardly worth while. 

1 As an example of a " born pray-er," I would mention 
the late Rev. Forbes Robinson, a lecturer at Christ's 
College, Cambridge. A friend writes of him: " He 
prayed, for those he loved, it is certain, for hours at a 
time. All his thoughts about some men gradually be- 
came prayers. And men must sometimes — with all 
reverence be it said — have experienced in his presence 

195 



THE MODERN MIND 

Their praying, like their religion, is a matter 
of tradition, with which they have never come 
personally to terms. And yet it may be 
doubted whether there are any who have re- 
ceived even an elementary religious training 
and yet cannot look back at this or that mo- 
ment in the past when they really prayed. 
Who of ns has not recalled, with wistful 
yearning, rare moments when under the pres- 
sure of some intolerable burden — some grief, 
perhaps, that threatened to wreck our life, — 
we wrestled with God in agony and would not 
let Him go until He blessed us; and now in 
duller and colder times we feel that if only 
we could regain the raptures of those great 
moments all would be well with us and prayer 
no longer a painful effort, but the very life 
of the soul. And yet on deeper reflection 
we realise that not catastrophe and upheaval 

the same kind of a feeling of some great unseen in- 
fluence at work as that which the disciples must have 
experienced in the presence of Christ after He, apart 
and alone, had watched through the night with God in 
prayer." See Letters to Ms Friends, by Forbes Kobinson, 
p. 51. 

196 



METHODS OF PRAYER 

of the inner world, but normal and steady 
growth, is the law of spiritual development, 
and the very difficulties which meet us when 
we pray are themselves a challenge to our 
souls, and form, it may be, a needed discipline 
without which prayer could not have its per- 
fect work. ~~These difficulties gather around 
the act of prayer, the Power to whom it is 
addressed, and the possibility of obtaining 
an answer. 

To begin with the difficulty involved in the 
very act of praying: one feels instinctively 
that there is a right and a wrong way, and 
that on our choice depends the success or 
failure of the effort. Here, as in every other 
exercise of our minds, we are subject to the 
psychological law of attention. We must 
attend to the matter in hand and refrain 
from attending to things that have no con- 
cern with our present interest. In the words 
of Christ, the great Master of the art of 
prayer, " When thou prayest, enter into thy 
closet, and when thou hast shut the door, 

197 



THE MODERN MIND 

pray to thy Father which is in secret; and 
thy Father which seeth in secret shall re- 
ward thee openly." x Here the law of atten- 
tion is formulated in terms at once simple 
and graphic. We are to shut the doors of 
the soul, and thus keep out the multitudi- 
nous impressions which tend to overwhelm 
and distract the mind. We must get alone 
with ourselves, with the interests about 
which we would pray, and with the God to 
whom we would pray; but how difficult this 
is only he can tell who has tried to do it. 
For a minute or two, perhaps, we succeed in 
thinking about the subject-matter of our 
prayer; then our minds fly off at a tangent, 
a thousand alien thoughts attract us, and we 
end by mechanically saying a prayer, 
which is a very different thing from 
praying. Perhaps in despair we gradually 
give up the habit as beyond us. What, then, 
is the remedy, if remedy there be? I an- 
swer, — just as lack of will power is cured by 

1 Matthew vi, 6. 

198 



METHODS OF PRAYER 

willing, or poverty of thought by thinking, 
so the power of attention is won by attending. 
We may apply Kant's great aphorism to our 
subject and say: we ought to pray, therefore 
we can. The truth is that behind the lack 
of attention there lurks often a deeper fault 
— lack of interest. We are not sufficiently 
interested in the affairs of the inner world, 
in our spiritual development, in our relation 
to God, and in our moral destiny. Were we 
overpoweringly interested in these things, 
prayer would become a natural, spontaneous 
outflow of the mind. In approaching, then, 
the act of prayer, we would do well, by quiet 
self-reflection, by brooding over the thought 
of Psalmist or prophet or teacher, to win 
a living conviction of the reality and para- 
mount importance of the things of the soul. 
Once this conviction has been wrought in us 
it will be harder for us not to pray than to 
pray; and as for the mental or moral effort 
involved in concentration of the mind on 
spiritual things, this becomes easier by repe- 

199 



THE MODERN MIND 

tition, like any other habit, and, like any- 
other habit, it is achieved, as a rule, grad- 
ually and after many a fall. For if prayer 
in essence be the voluntary turning of the 
soul to God, it needs no long or elaborate 
use of words. It may be, as the hymn says, 
only " the burden of a sigh, the falling of 
a tear." We can begin to acquire the art 
of prayer by learning, as it were, its alpha- 
bet. Scattered throughout the pages of 
Bible and Prayer-book and the great classics 
of Christian devotion will be found many a 
brief but pregnant phrase or sentence on 
which our spirits can wing their way to the 
heart of the Father in heaven. 



jy 



" Create in me a clean heart, God; 
And renew a right spirit within me. 

" Search me, God, and know my heart ; 
Try me and know my thoughts ; 
And see if there be any wicked way in me, 
And lead me in the way everlasting. ' ' 

* ' God, be merciful to me, a sinner. ' ' 



a 



Lord, I believe ; help Thou mine unbelief. " 

200 



METHODS OF PRAYER 

" Father, I have sinned against heaven and before 
Thee 
And am no more worthy to be called Thy son." 

" send out Thy light and Thy truth 
That they may lead me." 

These brief sentences are typical of many 
at our disposal. Beginning with such as 
these, we can gradually extend the scope of 
our prayer until the habit becomes as essen- 
tial to our spiritual life as food and exercise 
are to the life of the body. 

But not only is the art of prayer difficult 
of attainment conceived as an exercise of 
mind. Much of the failure in prayer that 
we deplore is owing to absence of that moral 
condition out of which alone true prayer can 
spring. This condition is absolute sincerity, 
perfect truthfulness. For the things about 
which we would pray to God are the most 
sacred intimacies of life — the sins we have 
committed and the uncommitted sins we 
have imagined ; the self-created difficulties in 
the management of our own characters ; our 
refusal to live up to the level of visions that 

201 



THE MODERN MIND 

have come to us in moments of insight and 
inspiration; the cowardice which has shrunk 
from opportunities of service to our fellow- 
men, or things more poignant still — the harsh 
words we have spoken and the unloving acts 
we have done to loved ones now beyond the 
reach of our penitence; the lack of a large 
and generous and forgiving spirit to those 
who are still with us ; the inarticulate hunger- 
ings and thirstings for redemption from our- 
selves, from the bondage of evil, for recon- 
ciliation with God and the world. But to 
think truly and honestly about these things, 
to throw off the subtle disguises with which 
self-seeking would deceive us, demands an 
integrity and singleness of mind that are cer- 
tainly not the work of a few brief, hurried 
moments. It is here that the sad contradic- 
tion which we see in some lives finds its ex- 
planation. The defender of prayer is pointed 
to persons brought up under the influence 
of religion and finding an apparent pleasure 
in the exercises of religion, and who yet re- 

802 



METHODS OF PRAYER 

main hard, selfish, un-Christlike. What value 
can prayer have, it is triumphantly asked, 
when it has failed to renew these with whom 
it has been a custom for years? The an- 
swer is obvious. Prayer itself, in the case 
of these persons, has become degraded to 
the low level on which their lives are led. It 
is implicated in their general insincerity of 
character. Having never got face to face 
with their real selves, their praying has not 
been real. It has been that most hateful of 
all things, shallow make-believe. 

The next difficulty which most of us feel 
when we pray besets us when we think of 
Him to whom we would pray. The spiritual 
world seems so remote, intangible, unreal, as 
compared with our external environment, 
this solid and substantial frame of things. 
We go forth to meet Nature, and she re- 
sponds to us through eye and ear and touch. 
We speak with our fellow-men, and at once 
communion of minds is established and all 
the joys of human intercourse are ours : but 

203 



THE MODERN MIND 

when we try to speak to God and hear Him 
speak to us, it is as though we were in a 
vacuum, a soundless silence that paralyses 
utterance. What we miss is the concrete 
and personal. When we try to think of the 
Infinite Spirit our thoughts lose themselves, 
and we wander in the immense vague and 
feel the bewilderment of him who cried: 

' ' that I knew where I might find Him ! 
Behold I go forward but He is not there; 
And backward but I cannot perceive Him ; 
On the left hand, where He doth work ; 
But I cannot behold Him ; 
He hideth Himself on the right hand 
That I cannot see Him. ' ' 1 

We try to think of Him as infinitely wise 
and powerful. But goodness, wisdom, power, 
are themselves impersonal things, and in 
them the heart can find no rest. Now, it 
goes without saying that without a sense of 
the reality of God, prayer is utterly worth- 
less. But this sense of God's reality springs 
itself out of some revelation of God to us. 

1 Job xxiii, 3, 8, 9. 

204 



METHODS OF PRAYER 

A heart unvisited by any revelation of the 
Divine would be a heart without prayer. 
11 No man can pray," says Hermann, " if 
by his own fault the memory that God once 
spoke to him lies buried and forgotten. Ham- 
let's stepfather offers a peculiarly striking 
illustration of this thought. 1 He feels his 
terrible position. He remembers that when 
in need men should cry out to God; but 
neither the summons to pray nor his need 
can show him how to pray. It is true that 
he has thoughts about God, but they bring 
him no help, because he can remember no 
experience of a direct revelation of God. ' ' 2 
Few there are who have not known one, at 
least, whom death has orbed into a 
perfect star, and who, when with us, 

1 " Pray can I not, 

Though inclination be as sharp as will; 
My stronger guilt defeats my strong intent, 
And, like a man to double business bound, 
I stand in pause where I shall first begin, 
And both neglect." 

— Hamlet, Act III, Scene 4. 

9 Art. Gebet in Herzog's Encyclopaedia. 

205 



THE MODERN MIND 

amid all the weaknesses and frailties of the 
flesh, radiated forth a very glory of God. 
Here, then, we can find a help for our weak- 
ness. God will become more real and more 
personal to us if when we pray we recall the 
figure of one whom we have known and 
loved, and brood on the beauty and grace of 
word and deed which the memory will never 
let die, and then say within ourselves : " This 
is God, only grander, more gracious, more 
beautiful by far." And from the imperfect 
embodiments of Divine grace we can turn be- 
times to the pages of the New Testament 
and look at the picture of the Son of Man 
as there portrayed. We cannot look at Him 
without feeling that in Him God comes to 
us, in Him God's love assumes visible em- 
bodiment, God's holiness ceases to be an 
ideal abstraction, takes to itself hands and 
feet and moves before us in a familiar and 
irresistible beauty. Putting ourselves face to 
face with Jesus Christ, the Infinite and the 
Absolute confront us, as it were, within the 

206 



METHODS OF PRAYER 

limits of space and time. The whole history 
of Jesus is but a parable of God's attitude 
toward us. Our prayers, therefore, will not 
lack definiteness or spiritual satisfaction if 
while we pray we imagine the figure of Christ 
in some characteristic moment of His career. 
As He places His hand on the sick and lifts 
disease from body and soul, we see, as in a 
mirror, the true character of God, as the 
Source from which all healing, health, and 
happiness come. When we see Him ascend- 
ing Mount Olivet to weep the tears of pity 
over His beloved Jerusalem, what is this but 
a sign of something still more wonderful — 
the vision of God, who from His heavenly 
Olivet is vexed by the sins and touched by 
the sorrows of His children. When we follow 
Him to His last great sacrifice, wherein He 
lays down His life for the sinful, we see 
through the temporal drama into the eternal 
passion of God who, in some mysterious 
way, is afflicted in all our affliction, and bears 
vicariously the burden of human guilt and 

207 



THE MODERN MIND 

loves every creature He has made with a love 
that works through death and disease and 
agony to final redemption. If, then, we let 
such thoughts as these fill the mind as we 
pray, the fire of devotion will not long re- 
main unkindled, because God will no longer 
be silent unto us, but will become at once 
supremely real and supremely lovable. 

Another, and to some minds the most seri- 
ous difficulty, concerns success in prayer. 
< ' Why should I continue to pray, ' ' an ob- 
jector will say, " since, of the hundreds of 
prayers I have offered, none, so far as I can 
see, have been answered? Why persist in 
a practice apparently so futile? " I would 
reply : i ' What do you mean by an answer 
to prayer ? Do you mean something in quan- 
tity and quality identical with the thing 
asked? If so, you would reduce your inter- 
course with God to the terms of mechanics or 
mathematics. But prayer is communion of 
a free and living soul with a free and living 
God. An outside observer judges the prayers 

208 



METHODS OF PRAYER 

of a good man to be unanswered if the exact 
things prayed for are not bestowed; and yet 
the man who prays feels that he has been 
answered, though in a way which he had per- 
haps not anticipated. The man who has not 
learned how to put the sense of God's pres- 
ence in the soul above all other goods, 
does not know the God whom Jesus 
Christ revealed. For is not this the 
highest good — to have God as our most 
intimate possession, to feel His life puls- 
ing in our hearts, to realise His love as 
a power stronger than all the ills and wrongs 
of existence? A New Testament writer tells 
us that Christ himself was heard crying 
to God in His agony; and yet we know 
that God answered His prayer, not by letting 
the cup pass from Him, but by strengthen- 
ing Him to drink it to its bitter dregs. So, 
too, it may chance that in our lives the bur- 
dens of sorrow are not removed, even by 
our intensest prayer, yet do we find an 
answer in an increase of strength to bear 

209 



THE MODERN MIND 

them. There are those who feel that were 
it not for prayer they would sink into despair 
and madness. Well, says Rothe, " He whom 
men have rendered unhappy, must see to 
it that he maintains friendship with God, 
so that at all times he may cast himself with 
sorrow upon His bosom and there let his 
tears have vent. ' ' x On the other hand, it 
is also true that a man may find himself in 
a situation which acts as a barrier between 
him and God. He wishes the situation modi- 
fied in order that once more he may enjoy 
the light of God's face. To pray and hope 
for such a modification is quite within the 
limits of true prayer. Moreover, we must 
remember that very often our prayers fail 
because they do not fulfil the conditions of 
true prayer. What these conditions are we 
can best learn when we turn to the teachings 
of Jesus. 

Jesus, it need scarcely be said, did not 
create prayer. He was the son of a people 

1 Still Hours, p. 250. 

210 



METHODS OF PRAYER 

among whom it was a recognised custom; 
and He came from a home where daily prayer 
sanctified daily toil. Here, as elsewhere, His 
function was to purify and deepen and spirit- 
ualise existing ideas. Hence, He taught His 
disciples how to pray — the technique, if we 
may say so, the method of the art. Much 
of what He said has been lost to us forever, 
but there are words of purest gold still pre- 
served. We can occasionally overhear Him 
as He prays. We have His model prayer, 
which excels all the creeds of Christendom 
as the one bond of Christian fellowship ; and 
here and there, scattered through the Gos- 
pels, we catch invaluable hints as to its es- 
sence, its method, its values, and its reward. 
He himself lived in an atmosphere where 
prayer, at any moment, was the natural ex- 
pression of His soul. The " desert place/ ' 
the lonely " mountain," was the favourite 
scene of His communion with the Father, a 
communion not of a few moments snatched 
from the exactions of a busy life, as is too 

211 



THE MODERN MIND 

often the case with us, but lasting contin- 
uously for several hours at a time. It is 
here that we touch the Holy of Holies of the 
Master's life, and here are unveiled to us 
the secret sources of His power. The most 
realistic of the Evangelists show Him ex- 
hausted, depleted of strength and poise by 
the strain of teaching and healing in the 
enervating air of the Valley of the Jordan, 
and unbalanced amid the cries and turmoil 
of the thronging multitude. After a few 
hours' sleep, He rises up before dawn, and 
seeks a natural solitude that He may recover 
strength and self-possession through con- 
scious intercourse with God. It is typical 
of His entire history. What He gains in 
prayer He gives to men; and when His forces 
are spent He turns back again from man to 
God for fresh supplies. Thus does His life 
move on in perfect harmony. The spiritual 
energy which He squanders freely at the call 
of need is ever renewed in the exercise of 
prayer. His lessons on prayer are born 

212 



METHODS OF PRAYER 

of His own experience and therefore are 
as vital as when they were first uttered. 
He warns His disciples against false forms 
of prayer — the prayer of the hypocrite, who 
makes an ostentatious parade of his piety; 
the prayer of the heathen, whose mechanical 
repetition of certain formulas degrades the 
whole process to the level of magic. The 
fatal flaw of both Pharisaic and pagan types 
of praying is that in neither is there real 
speech with God. In the one, the eye of him 
who prays is on his fellow-men. In the other, 
it is directed to some earthly desire. In 
neither is it fixed on God. The very essence 
of prayer lies in direct personal intercourse 
with God. In two short stories, not without 
a touch of grave humour, Jesus emphasises 
persistence in prayer in spite of apparent 
failure. The story of the man who, at mid- 
night, under the pressure of a sudden emer- 
gency, knocks at his neighbour's door for 
help and does not cease knocking, in spite 
of the grumblings of the friend within, until 

213 



THE MODERN MIND 

his petition is granted, 1 and the story of the 
unjust judge who, regardless of the claims 
of justice, human or divine, was so regardful 
of his own comfort that rather than be worn 
out by the widow's ceaseless importunity he 
granted her legal redress, 2 are so constructed 
as to show that if persistence can win success 
with men who are not even moderately good, 
it will much more avail with Him who, as 
the Father, waits to give " good things to 
them that ask Him." Hence He utters, as 
His manner was, without any qualification 
whatever, His great exhortation to prayer: 
' i Ask, and it shall be given you ; seek, and 
ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened 
unto you. ' ' 3 Finally, the prayer that brings 
a blessing is the prayer of faith. Without 
the going forth of the soul in trustful con- 
fidence, prayer remains as a barren men- 
tal exercise. Once let it be imbued with 
a spirit of filial hope and trust, and it 

1 Luke xi, 5-8. 2 Luke xviii, 1-5. 

3 Matthew vii, 7. 

814 



METHODS OF PRAYER 

can uproot mountains and achieve the im- 
possible. 

A consideration of the Lord's model prayer 
offers valuable suggestions on our subject. 
This prayer is at once the alphabet and fin- 
ished expression of the praying art. It sums 
up in a few brief sentences the inarticulate 
aspirations of the immature mind, and at 
the same time is so comprehensive that he 
who can pray it, not as if it were a mechani- 
cal formula, but from the heart, has reached 
a stage of spiritual growth than which there 
is none higher on earth. In the form in 
which it probably fell from the Master's 
lips, its brevity, conciseness, and simplic- 
ity are still more obvious than in the 
form which came into vogue later. 

" Father! Hallowed be Thy Name! Thy 
Kingdom come ! Give us this day our apper- 
taining bread! and forgive us our debts as 
we have forgiven our debtors ! And lead us 
not into temptation! " Two petitions for 
God's glory and the good of the world, and 

215 



THE MODERN MIND 

three for personal goods — daily bread, for- 
giveness, and salvation — the whole addressed 
to God as Father, who knows what we have 
need of before we ask Him — such is this 
wonderful prayer. From it we learn the 
type of prayer that wins acceptance with 
God. It is the prayer which lifts us above 
the low earthly region to which our minds 
naturally gravitate, and carries us into the 
spiritual world, which puts first the thought 
of God and of His Kingdom, which seeks, 
not to change God's will, but to be in harmony 
with it, which perseveres in spite of toil and 
discouragement, and which finally is purged 
of all selfishness because it seeks no good 
apart from the good of others. 

To some minds the value and efficacy of in- 
tercessory prayer raises a great difficulty. 
Such persons may say: " I can understand 
praying for myself, because I can see 
that prayer may work as a subcon- 
scious reaction in my own mind. But 
how can my prayer help others? " Now, 

216 



METHODS OF PRAYER 

here we might plead the example of the 
Master of prayer, who prayed for Peter 
that his faith should not fail, and who with 
His dying breath interceded for His murder- 
ers. We might plead, too, that in praying 
for others we obey the deepest and tenderest 
instincts of the soul. How can we love one 
whom we never remember before God? We 
might also argue that the prayer of inter- 
cession urges us to unselfish service in the 
behalf of him for whom we pray and thus 
tends to bring about its own fulfilment. 
11 There is nothing," says William Law, the 
great mystic, " that makes us love a man 
so much as praying for him; and when you 
can do this sincerely for any man, you have 
fitted your soul for the performance of every- 
thing that is kind and civil towards him . . . 
be daily on your knees in a solemn, delib- 
erate performance of this devotion, praying 
for others in such form, with such length, 
importunity, and earnestness as you use for 
yourself; and you will find all little, ill- 

217 



THE MODERN MIND 

natured passions die away, your heart grow 
great and generous, delighting in the com- 
mon happiness of others as you used only 
to delight in your own. ' ' * 

These considerations have been re-en- 
forced by modern knowledge, which recog- 
nises the intimate relations between mind 
and mind, and points to the possibility that 
strong desires and feelings may by their own 
power reach and help other souls. The 
theory of telepathy is winning more credence 
the more it is investigated. Moreover, the 
close connection between matter and mind 
shows how prayer for the sick, especially 
if the sick are conscious that they are being 
prayed for, can have a real effect. Strong 
direction of our wills toward what we believe 
to be good should not end in our own good, 
but should embrace the good of others. 

So far I have spoken of prayer as an act 
of normal and self-possessed persons; but 
the question is often asked, " Are the meth- 

1 The Serious Call. 
218 



METHODS OF PRAYER 

ods of prayer suitable for the well equally 
suitable for the sick? " Take the case of a 
man suffering from the miseries of neuras- 
thenia or psychasthenia : how can he pray, 
seeing that the very faculties involved in the 
act of praying are profoundly disturbed, and 
the effort of mental concentration is an im- 
possible task? In such cases, where the cen- 
tral citadel of personality is invaded, it is 
obvious that a different method of prayer 
may be pursued. Constantly do I hear peo- 
ple suffering from one or other of the numer- 
ous nervous maladies of our time complain 
that they cannot pray, and that their im- 
perfect attempts have brought no spiritual 
comfort. The reason is that in trying to 
pray as they were accustomed to do in the 
days when they enjoyed good health they 
put an insupportable strain upon their psy- 
chic energies, with consequent increased dis- 
turbance and mental turmoil. Relaxation — 
not Concentration — should be the motto of 
the nervously afflicted. The body should be 

219 



THE MODERN MIND 

put in the most restful and relaxed attitude ; 
the mind should not be intensely concerned 
with any definite or concrete desire, but 
should be filled with a sense of the Divine 
Presence, with a feeling of perfect resigna- 
tion to the Divine will. In other words, the 
form of prayer which is to be commended 
to the suffering is what has been long known 
in the Church as " Practice of the Presence 
of God. ' ' In the quietude of mind and calm of 
bodily feelings, which are possible in a state 
of relaxation, the soul is opened to revela- 
tions, sometimes richer and more significant 
than any vouchsafed in times of perfect 
health. It is told of that saintly woman of 
the fourteenth century, Julian of Norwich, 
that in a time of severe sickness she received 
a revelation in the strength of which she was 
able to live for many years afterwards, 
though the revelation itself was not fully 
made clear till a much later time. The ex- 
planation she gives in the language of the 
mystics: " ' Wouldst thou learn thy Lord's 

220 



METHODS OF PRAYER 

meaning in this thing? Learn it well: Love 
was His meaning. Who showed it thee? 
Love. What showed He thee ? Love. Where- 
fore showed it He? For Love. Hold thee 
therein and thou shalt learn and know more 
in the same. But thou shalt never know nor 
learn therein other thing without end. ' Thus 
was I learned that Love was our Lord's 
meaning." * This story is not without paral- 
lel in our own time. Cases have come to my 
knowledge of persons who have experienced 
in this form of prayer a sense of spiritual 
exaltation, a feeling of inward rest and satis- 
faction which played no small part in their 
eventual restoration to normal self-control. 
Of course, these experiences will be explained 
away by those who do not believe in the 
reality of a spiritual world, as self-created 
delusions. But a delusion does not create 
a high type of spiritual character, does not 
lead to profound views of God and of human 
life. We must believe that these things are 

1 Iorge: Studies of English Mystics, p. 77. 
221 



THE MODERN MIND 

the product of contact with the Spirit of 
truth and goodness. The whole question of 
prayer, in essence, resolves itself to this: Is 
there a God able to speak to the creatures 
He has made? If there is, but if He is un- 
willing so to speak, He can be no God worthy 
of reverence or even of a moment's thought. 
If, however, He is both able and willing to 
speak, we ought surely to believe the men 
and women who say they have heard His 
voice. However great the difficulties which 
logic and common sense create, life itself 
will teach us that as the years pass and the 
shadows of dissolution, sorrow, and death 
gather around us, hard as it may be to pray, 
it will be still harder not to pray. 



222 



CHAPTER VIII 

IMMORTALITY AND SCIENCE 

One of the most serious consequences of the 
present unsettlement in religious thought is 
the sad eclipse that has befallen the great 
consolation of humanity, the hope 

1 ' That those we call the dead 
Are breathers of an ampler day 
For ever nobler ends. " 

Turn in whatever direction we may, forces 
of modern thought and civilisation are en- 
gaged, it would seem, in sapping the founda- 
tions of belief in man's immortal destiny. 
The very complexity of the life of to-day, 
the multiplicity of its interests, intellectual 
and social, so fascinate the individual mind, 
so submerge it in finite things, that it 
cannot get face to face with that question 
of questions: " What am I? " and so sees no 

223 



THE MODERN MIND 

reason to ask: " Whither do I go? " The 
world of knowledge and of art orbs itself 
into a self-contained whole, the wealth of 
which is so great that a lifetime seems all 
too little to compass it and the mind has no 
reserves left for anything beyond. And if 
through some painful experience, some sud- 
den stroke piercing to the soul's inmost 
depths, one awakes to the need of an answer 
to these problems, with what a depressing 
consensus of doubt or dogmatic denial is he 
confronted! Science, which undertakes to 
play the role, formerly assumed by theology, 
of guide and ruler of civilisation, accepts 
as ultimate bounds behind which we cannot 
go, such things as matter and motion, or 
mass and energy; proposes to show how, 
by these means, the world has come to be, 
and frowns on any attempt to raise the ques- 
tion of ultimate origin and destiny. When 
this agnostic attitude is abandoned, as it is 
by such a scientific authority as Professor 
Haeckel, it issues in the most thorough- 

224 



IMMORTALITY AND SCIENCE 

going assertion of the impossibility of a life 
after death. 

Professor Haeckel, whose ambition it is to 
raise empirical science into a philosophy de- 
void of all metaphysics, settles the questions 
of origin and destiny by the help of a few 
concepts borrowed from the very meta- 
physics which he rejects. 1 He brands the 
three fundamental truths of religion, — God, 
Freedom, and Immortality, — as the " three 
buttresses of superstition," which it is his 
business as a scientific man utterly to de- 
molish. He assures us that all the proofs 
usually put forward in defence of belief in 
a future existence have been shown to be in- 
consistent with the facts established by 
physiological psychology and the doctrine of 
descent. The theological idea that God made 
man in his own image and breathed into his 
nostrils the breath of life, is " a pure myth." 
The moral proof, Kant's famous argument 

1 Compare E. Boutroux: Science and Religion in Con- 
temporary Philosophy, p. 149. 

225 



THE MODERN MIND 

that the highest good is possible only 
under the pre-supposition of the immortality 
of the soul, that the future life as inseparably 
bound up with the moral law is a postulate of 
the pure practical reason — this is " nothing 
more than a pious wish." The teleological 
proof, that man is equipped with powers and 
capacities for which earth and time afford no 
adequate scope, rests, we are informed, " on 
a false anthropism. ' ' 1 All these and similar 
ideas have been completely overturned by the 
advance of scientific criticism. 

As the arguments of religion and phi- 
losophy have been undermined and no longer 
convince educated men, modern knowledge 
has brought forward proofs, physiological, 
histological, experimental, and pathological, 
which, it is alleged, demonstrate this treas- 
ured faith to be a mere superstition. Anthro- 
pology shows how the dream of a future life 
has visited, in very different forms, the minds 
of all peoples. The Indian dreamed of his 
1 The Riddle of the Universe, pp. 203, 204. 
226 



IMMORTALITY AND SCIENCE 

hunting fields; the Mohammedan of dark- 
eyed houris and flower-decked gardens; the 
Norseman of banquets, with haunches of 
venison and goblets of wine. Thus did imagi- 
nation project into the future the desires of 
sense. What greater warrant has the Chris- 
tian hope than these earthly wishes of the 
non-Christian mind? Biology since Darwin 
has been accumulating the proofs of our kin- 
ship with the brute creation, and man ap- 
pears to be a kind of zoological monstrosity, 
compact of myriad disharmonies — a para- 
doxical absurdity. Physiological psychology 
teaches as a commonplace that our mental 
life is a function of the gray matter of the 
brain ; and the inference is easy that the func- 
tion vanishes with the dissipation of its or- 
gan. To suppose that thought can survive 
the brain would be tantamount to supposing 
that the steam in a tea-kettle could survive 
the destruction of the tea-kettle. Physical 
chemistry discloses the universe as a con- 
geries of elements in motion; but the in- 

227 



THE MODERN MIND 

destructibility of matter and energy is now 
in grave question, as it is indeed a mere in- 
ference from experience. 1 In a universe 
where nothing persists, how can man claim 
immortality, consisting, as he does, of a few 
pounds of carbon and lime, a few ounces of 
phosphorus, sodium, potassium, etc., and so 
many cubic feet of hydrogen, oxygen, and 
nitrogen? To sum up Professor Haeckel's 
thesis: " The belief in the immortality of 
the human soul is a dogma which is in hope- 
less contradiction with the most solid em- 
pirical truths of modern science. ' ' 2 

And when we turn to philosophy, which at 
one time was supposed in spite of its inability 
to bake bread, to be able to give us God, 
Freedom, and Immortality, we find it put 
to the greatest straits in establishing the 
reality of the individual against the all-en- 
gulfing monism of absolute idealism on the 
one hand, and the equally voracious monism 

1 C. Ostwald: Individuality and Immortality. 
2 Op. cit., p. 210. 

228 



IMMORTALITY AND SCIENCE 

of the non-theistic doctrine of evolution on 
the other. Mr. F. H. Bradley, one of the 
acutest metaphysical minds of this genera- 
tion, is of opinion that " a future life must 
be taken as decidedly improbable; " and his 
ultimate reason for so thinking is simply 
that man is an unreal aspect of the absolute, 
without any independent worth of his own. 1 

Professor Paulsen holds that ethics must 
stand henceforth on a basis quite independ- 
ent of belief in a future life, since this belief 
itself is in a very parlous state at present, 
nor is there much hope of strengthening it. 2 

The fact of this modern way of thinking 
is too obvious to be questioned. There are 
many who are conscious at times of grave 
uncertainty, and there are some who 
think that even should the belief that death 
ends all become predominant, religion might 
still live on and gain fresh conquests. 
There are some whose affections drive them 

1 Appearance and Reality, p. 505. 
1 System der EtMk, p. 406. 

229 



THE MODERN MIND 

to accept a faith which their reason rejects. 
Zola, all his life an agnostic, could not bear 
the thought of bidding an eternal farewell to 
the mother whom he loved, and in order to 
make life tolerable, took refuge in a belief 
which he had consistently rejected. How- 
ever natural this feeling may be, it is not 
strong enough to bear the weight of immor- 
tality. The desire is father to the thought, 
and we are too partial to those whom we love 
to take a dispassionate view of their possible 
future. Some there are who resign them- 
selves to the inevitable with bitter scorn and 
savage contempt for the universe and all its 
ways. Their spirit is that of the French 
writer, who sees in man only " the hero of 
a lamentable drama played in an obscure 
corner of the universe in virtue of blind 
laws before an indifferent nature and 
with annihilation as its denouement." * 
It is here that we may see the prob- 
lem of a future life taking on a social 

1 li. Ackermann: Ma Tie, p. 111. 
230 



IMMORTALITY AND SCIENCE 

and very human significance. Sociological 
and medical experts are agreed that suicide 
is alarmingly on the increase. 1 Behind the 
facts recorded in the statistical tables there 
lies another of still deeper meaning — the 
weakening of hope through loss of faith in 
a future life. It is obvious that only the 
man who is convinced himself that death ends 
all can risk the chance in which so many of 
his fellow-men believe, that it does not end 
all, and rather than bear the troubles that 
he has, prefers those that he knows not of. 
"When some overwhelming calamity, some 
bitter sorrow or intolerable shame overtakes 
the modern man, he is prone to agree with 
the poet when he sings: 



a 



Now more than ever seems it rich to die, 
To cease upon the midnight with no pain." 



There are others who wish to be- 
lieve, yet feel the various metaphysical and 

1 In 1900 the number of suicides amounted to 6,735; 
in 1908 the number was nearly 11,000. 

231 



THE MODERN MIND 

religious arguments to be little better than 
broken reeds, and can but trust the larger 
hope. For them the traditional forms in 
which the idea has clothed itself in the past 
are no longer possible, and in the absence 
of a more adequate embodiment the essence 
of the belief has difficulty in maintaining it- 
self. Few, if any, can rise to the lofty hero- 
ism of Auguste Comte, who rejoiced in the 
sacrifice of the individual to the race, and 
asserted that death would seem to him a poor 
affair if it did not involve his own extinc- 
tion. Speaking generally, men shrink from 
annihilation, and in spite of the substitutes 
for personal continuance after death offered 
by Positivism and Absolute Idealism, the 
sting of death, the fear that in dying man 
perishes like the brute, remains unextr acted. 
Professor Osier thinks that the modern 
man is utterly indifferent to the whole mat- 
ter. This finite world is enough for him, and 
he recks not of any other. " Where," asks 
the Professor, ' ' among the educated and the 

232 



IMMORTALITY AND SCIENCE 

refined, much less among the masses, do we 
find any urgent desire for a future life? It 
is not a subject of drawing-room conversa- 
tion, and the man whose habit it is to button- 
hole his acquaintances and inquire earnestly 
after their souls is shunned like the Ancient 
Mariner. Among the clergy it is not thought 
polite to refer to so delicate a topic, except 
officially from the pulpit. Most ominous of 
all, as indicating the utter absence of interest 
on the part of the public, is the silence of 
the press, in the columns of which are mani- 
fest daily the works of the flesh." 1 

Did men really entertain such a wonderful 
thought as survival after death, would they 
not make of it a subject of daily conference, 
and vie with one another in expressions of 
astonishment and joy at such a glorious pros- 
pect? So, indeed, it would seem. And yet 
the idea is based on a very superficial con- 
ception of human nature. Men are dimly 
conscious that they live in a world full of 

1 Science and Immortality, pp. 11, 12. (?) 
233 



THE MODERN MIND 

mysteries, of the strangest contradictions 
and the most perplexing riddles, such as life 
and birth and love and death; yet in the 
small-talk of the drawing-room and the news- 
paper these great realities occupy an insig- 
nificant place as compared with bridge and 
automobile racing and the latest scandal in 
the smart set. 

The trivialities of the moment may well 
form the light froth that dances on the sur- 
face of human intercourse. But to suppose 
that this is all, that there are no depths be- 
neath where the things that lie nearest our 
souls secrete themselves is to commit the 
common fallacy of taking a part for the 
whole. And certainly in our own time there 
are signs that a revival of religion is at hand. 
Among these signs not the least notable is 
a returning interest in the question of human 
destiny, if one is to judge from the books 
and discussions in the reviews and maga- 
zines dealing with this question. It looks 
as if men were at last feeling that the gospel 

234 



IMMORTALITY AND SCIENCE 

of a purely earthly progress as formulated 
by science does not suffice to stay the infinite 
yearning of the heart. 

We are told, indeed, that it is the part of 
wise men not to ask whether this or that 
doctrine agrees with one's dearest wishes, 
but to accept facts, and with stoic resigna- 
tion bow to their sternest implications. And 
the advice is sound, only the interests in- 
volved are so momentous — such interests as 
the significance of life, whether there is any 
possibility of realising the Good, here or 
hereafter, the dignity and worth of hu- 
man effort and aspiration — that it is our 
bounden duty to scan the alleged facts with 
the most critical care before we resign our- 
selves to a doctrine of despair. Nay, should 
it turn out that the arguments for and against 
balance each other, we would be justified in 
tipping the scale on the affirmative side by 
throwing into it our own subjective need, 
our imperative demand for a belief that will 
harmonise our experience. 

235 



THE MODERN MIND 

What are the facts which, from the stand- 
point of the physician, seem to compel us 
to a negative conclusion? To begin with the 
more obvious, Dr. Osier tells us that the ma- 
jority of the dying express no fears or hopes 
about the other world, that, as a rule, man 
dies as he has lived, practically uninfluenced 
by the thought of a future life. " I have," 
he says, " had careful records of about five 
hundred death-beds studied particularly with 
reference to the modes of death and the sen- 
sations of the dying. The great majority 
gave no sign, one way or the other ; like their 
birth, their death was i a sleep and a for- 
getting. ' ' ' x 

Surely, this distinguished writer is wrong 
in supposing that a true criterion for judging 
whether faith in a future life has any place 
in the thoughts of men is to be found in the 
feelings of the soul as it approaches its 
earthly limit. Not to man weakened by dis- 
ease, his moral and spiritual energies dulled 
1 Science and Immortality, p. 19. 
236 



IMMORTALITY AND SCIENCE 

through the collapse of the body, but to man 
in the fulness of his powers, amid the activi- 
ties of his daily calling, with the thoughts 
that surge through his brain, the hopes that 
inspire his heart, the ideals that inform his 
conscience, should appeal be made. Victor 
Hugo, standing beside the open grave of Bal- 
zac, uttered these memorable words: " No, 
it is not the Unknown to him. No, I have 
said it before and I shall never weary of 
saying it, it is not darkness to him; it 
is Light! It is not the end, but the begin- 
ning; not nothingness, but eternity. Such 
coffins proclaim immortality. Do we not say 
to ourselves here to-day that it is impossible 
that a great genius in this life can be other 
than a great spirit after death? " Now, it 
was the vision, not of the dying but of the 
living Balzac that forced from Hugo this 
confession of faith. 

Moreover, a phenomenon well known to 
those who minister to the dying is their curi- 
ous reserve about their deepest feelings, as 

237 



THE MODERN MIND 

though the soul, preparatory to her strange 
lone journey, withdrew into herself, absorbed 
in her own affairs ; and this self-observation 
may well be mistaken for blank indifference. 
Much more important and perplexing are 
the facts of physiological psychology. These 
facts may be summed up in the familiar for- 
mula: " No psychosis without neurosis.' ' 
Modern investigation has shown the inex- 
plicably close relation that subsists between 
mind and brain. Brain and the manifesta- 
tions of mind grow and decline together. 
Stop the flow of arterial blood to the brain 
and profound disturbance of consciousness 
ensues. Arrest the development of the brain, 
and an idiot is the result. Administer co- 
caine or alcohol, and you change the moral 
and intellectual character. These common- 
places have received a new and sinister sig- 
nificance from the observations made in our 
hospitals and psychological laboratories. 
For it is now established that not only is 
there a general correlation between the ac- 

238 



IMMORTALITY AND SCIENCE 

tivities of the cerebral cortex as a whole and 
the mental principle, but also that various 
mental functions are localised in given cere- 
bral areas. It has been found by positive 
experiment that the division of functions in 
different portions of the cortex is connected 
with the organs of sensation and movement. 
But experimental psychologists maintain 
that fuller knowledge will show the various 
regions with which complex mental phe- 
nomena are correlated; nay, that we may 
even hope some day to be able to acquire the 
exact physical equivalents to mental func- 
tioning. One of the greatest of living psy- 
chiatrists asserts that there is, so to say, a 
" character centre,' ' a " chief organ of char- 
acter," in the brain. This organ he locates 
in a certain part of the cortex which he calls 
" the sphere of bodily feeling," because on 
that part almost every operation of the body 
has an influence. It is this centre which is 
especially susceptible to narcotics, such as 
alcohol and morphine, which, as we know, 

239 



THE MODERN MIND 

have an especially disintegrating and degrad- 
ing effect on moral character. On the state 
of this centre depend those impulses which 
make a man a cruel murderer or a tender- 
hearted philanthropist. 1 

Thought, then, is a function of the brain 
and involves, doubtless, in every one of its 
conscious operations, the consumption of the 
brain substance. It is almost impossible to 
exaggerate the interdependence of mind and 
body. Must it not follow, as the night the 
day, that the dissolution of the brain carries 
with it the dissolution of the mental function? 
Such is the inference implicitly drawn by 
many investigators, and it has found explicit 
expression in the writings of such men as 
Duhring and Haeckel. There is no doubt 
that the facts on which this argument rests 
appeal very strongly to the unreflective imag- 
ination, as there is also no doubt that the 
theory here asserted or implied — that nerv- 

1 Prof. P. Flechsig: Die Grenzen geistiger Gesundheit und 
Krankheit, pp. 35, 36. 

240 



IMMORTALITY AND SCIENCE 

ous changes are the causes of mental changes, 
— is for experimental purposes an excellent 
working hypothesis. But if we wish to ob- 
tain an insight into the deeper as apart from 
the externally observed relations of brain 
and mind, physiological psychology is quite 
helpless. All that this science can give 
us is two parallel series of occurrences — a 
series of molecular changes in the brain and 
a series of psychical states : but the relation 
between these two series defies the utmost 
scrutiny. Between the material and the psy- 
chical events there is an unbridged chasm. 
To say that thought is a " function " of 
brain, except for certain specific purposes, 
is to say something that is not strictly true. 
If the word ' ' function ' ' be used in the 
physiological sense, then thought or con- 
sciousness does not come into view at all; 
the function or specific work of the brain 
in this sense is to control the body. If it be 
insisted that mind is simply a name for the 
sum total of cerebral activities, I must 

241 



THE MODERN MIND 

ask what the objector means by such a state- 
ment. A cerebral activity is a form of 
motion and we know motion simply as 
a mental state. In other words, mind 
is first. Motion is an inference from 
mind. To say, then, that mind is a func- 
tion of, or is produced by motion, is to 
reverse the order of nature and make the 
effect precede the cause. The truth is, for 
the physical psychologist, feeling and con- 
sciousness on the one hand, neural changes 
on the other, are ultimate facts behind which 
he cannot go. As to why the mind has a 
body he has not the smallest inkling. The 
problem of the fundamental and not merely 
externally observed relation must be handed 
over to the metaphysician for solution, and 
his solution will be affected by his philo- 
sophical or general world-view. The danger 
which besets the physiological psychologist 
is that of turning an observed co-existence 
into a metaphysical necessity. When we 
argue that because on this planet within our 



IMMORTALITY AND SCIENCE 

experience thought is never known to exist 
apart from a brain, therefore throughout the 
entire cosmos thought can exist only in con- 
nection with gray matter, it is evident that 
we are occupying quite untenable ground. It 
is against this very argument that John 
Stuart Mill in a well-known passage raises 
a warning voice. 1 

Now, so long as the correlation of mind 
and brain cannot be shown to be metaphysi- 
cal, that is, grounded in the very nature of 
things, it is open to us to believe, if there are 
reasons for the belief, that the fall of the 
brain does not necessarily mean the fall of 
the soul. It is true, as has been already said, 
that on many of the facts of psycho-physics 
the imagination fastens with great avidity. 
But, after all, it is reason, not imagination, 
that is the final judge ; and in the interest of 
reality it may be necessary to resist the im- 
pression which external phenomena make 
upon the mind. 

1 Essays on Religion: Immortality. 
243 



THE MODERN MIND 

But we can go further than this. If from 
one point of view science has made it harder 
to believe in the life after death, from an- 
other she has made it easier; for she dis- 
closes the universe as a storehouse of forces 
and elements, more subtle and complex by 
far than the dreams of the old-world physi- 
cists had ever conceived; and the Pauline 
notion of a " spiritual body," however un- 
thinkable, cannot be deemed impossible. Nor 
must we forget in this connection that the 
psychical research movement, in spite of its 
vagaries and its willingness in the person of 
some of its representatives to accept as 
proven on slight evidence the most stupen- 
dous doctrines, has nevertheless made a sig- 
nificant contribution to our subject. There 
is no denying that it is creating for many 
minds an atmosphere favourable to belief in 
human immortality. It is doing this not be- 
cause it has proved the spiritistic hypothesis, 
for no adequate proof of this hypothesis has 
as yet been offered; but because it has re- 

244 



IMMORTALITY AND SCIENCE 

vealed the extraordinary resources, the mar- 
vellous possibilities of our inner world — pos- 
sibilities which in ordinary life scarce reveal 
a trace of their presence. For example, 
thought-transference, or communication from 
mind to mind otherwise than through the 
known channels of sense, may now be re- 
garded as exceedingly probable. 1 The long 
arm of coincidence cannot account for the 
connection which has been found to exist 
between death and apparitions of the dying 
to persons at a distance. It is true that the 
nature of the connection, whether physical 
or psychological, and the conditions under 
which it appears, have not been made 
out. 2 

The phenomena of mediumship, when clari- 

1 " For nearly thirty years the investigators of the 
Society for Psychical Eesearch have worked at the 
subject and have brought forward a body of evidence 
based partly on experiment, partly on observation, suf- 
ficient, at any rate, to establish thought-transference 
or telepathy as a working hypothesis." — F. Podmore: 
Mesmerism and Christian Science (1909), p. 168. 

2 Nevertheless the fact of the connection is scarcely 
open to doubt. 

245 



THE MODERN MIND 

fied of the deception, conscious and uncon- 
scious, to which mediums seem peculiarly- 
liable, appear to indicate that the existence 
of mind is not absolutely dependent on the 
brain and nervous system. Some investi- 
gators are of opinion that there are persons 
of a peculiar organisation whose bodily or- 
ganism can be controlled by foreign person- 
alities, and, all unknown to themselves, com- 
municate knowledge which could not have 
been obtained by any normal means. Modern 
research, if it can give us proof of the exist- 
ence of discarnate spirits, ought not to be de- 
spised. If we are convinced of the reality 
of these mysterious phenomena, then we 
have a strong argument wherewith to sup- 
port the Gospel history when it declares that 
Christ rose from the dead and revealed Him- 
self to more than five hundred disciples. So 
strong is this argument that the late Mr. F. 
W. H. Myers ventured the bold prophecy: 
" In consequence of the new evidence, all 
reasonable men a century hence will believe 

246 



IMMORTALITY AND SCIENCE 

the Resurrection of Christ, whereas in de- 
fault of the new evidence, no reasonable men 
a century hence would have believed it. ' ' 1 
The ground of this prophecy is, of course, 
the recognition of the uniformity of law, 
which makes the uniqueness of an event its 
almost inevitable refutation. Communica- 
tion from the unseen to the seen must imply 
laws identical from age to age, like the laws 
of chemistry or of motion. William James, 
a singularly open-minded and fearless inves- 
tigator, felt that after thirty years' explora- 
tion in this mysterious region, he was forced 
to accept one of two theories, the theory 
that discarnate spirits could communicate 
with this world, or the theory that communi- 
cation to living minds is possible otherwise 
than through the recognised channels of 
sense. On the whole, the balance of proba- 
bility appeared to be in favour of the former 
hypothesis. And yet to rest the whole weight 

1 Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death, 
Vol. II, p. 288. 

247 



THE MODERN MIND 

of immortality on the evidence as it stands at 
present would be a hazardous proceeding. 
To sum up this part of our discussion: 
physiological psychology cannot forbid faith 
in a future life. If it is impossible to con- 
ceive how the mind can think without a brain, 
it is equally impossible to conceive how the 
mind can think with a brain. If mind is at 
the mercy of physical processes, it is equally 
true that physical processes can be pro- 
foundly affected by mind; that, as modern 
surgery seems to show, mind can utilise 
fresh parts of its physical environment 
should its accustomed seat of operations be 
destroyed or removed. And so physiological 
science leaves the way open for the belief if 
on other grounds the belief is justified. 

There is another science, however, which 
has made immense strides in our time, and 
which, it is confidently alleged, has given the 
deathblow to the hope of a life beyond. Bi- 
ology knows no immortality, except possibly 
in the case of certain unicellular organisms 

248 



IMMORTALITY AND SCIENCE 

which can renew their life indefinitely by 
division; but our conscious souls are mortal, 
and die with the physical organisms of which 
they are the functions. If it be asked on 
what biological ground we are forced to this 
despairing conclusion, M. Metchnikoff, in his 
work on the Nature of Man, leaves us in no 
uncertainty; for, to put his thesis briefly, 
man is not, as religion supposes, a being un- 
like other beings, made in the image of God, 
animated with the Divine breath and im- 
mortal, but a kind of miscarriage of an ape, 
endowed with profound intelligence, and 
capable of great progress. The first man 
was a zoological monstrosity, appearing sud- 
denly with qualities denied to his parents, 
much as the famous calculating boy, Jacques 
Inaudi, burst upon an astonished Europe a 
few years ago, from an ancestor in which no 
premonition of his extraordinary gifts could 
be discerned. A capacity for progress, re- 
sulting from the possession of a spacious 
cranium with a brain of abnormal size, 

249 



THE MODERN MIND 

was transmitted from the lucky anthro- 
poid ape to his descendants, and en- 
abled them to propagate and eventually out- 
strip their kinsmen and to gain dominion 
over them. Man, then, is a kind of " sport," 
an accidental variation from the monkey 
tribe, arriving we know not how, but in es- 
sence the same as the stock from which he 
sprang. Hence to the question, " Is there 
a future life? " M. Metchnikoff replies un- 
hesitatingly, " No. As the progeny of the 
anthropoid apes man shares their fate." " A 
future life," he says, " has no single argu- 
ment to support it, and the non-existence of 
life after death is in consonance with the 
large range of human knowledge." Now, 
that we are allied by a thousand links to the 
lower creatures has become since Darwin 
a commonplace of cultivated thought. How 
man sprang from his sub-human progenitor 
we do not know: for, of course, M. Metch- 
nikoff 's theory is a mere guess, and is tanta- 
mount to a surrender of the problem as in- 

250 



IMMORTALITY AND SCIENCE 

soluble. But that man has risen from the 
non-human to the human, from barbarism to 
civilisation, may be taken as proved. It is 
not necessary, as Huxley said, to base man's 
dignity upon his great toe, or assume that he 
is lost if an ape has a hippo-campus minor. 
For man is what he is and cannot be identi- 
fied with that from which he emerged. The 
true nature of a cause reveals itself only in 
the effect. The germ from which a dog de- 
velops is indistinguishable from the germ 
which produces a philosopher ; yet the philos- 
opher is not a dog. Whatever man may have 
been in the past, we know in a measure what 
he is in the present. And it is his nature 
as actually disclosed in history that we must 
scrutinise when we raise the question of his 
spiritual permanence. The great problem 
then is, What is man? If in essence he is 
one with the brute creation, a superior 
species of ape, then it would be absurd to 
attribute to him moral freedom or the power 
of realising the immanent possibilities of his 

251 



THE MODERN MIND 

nature, and an immortal future for him 
would as a consequence be meaningless. As 
a mass of inert tendency he would be a mere 
link in the chain of being, a means to an end, 
not an end in himself. Or again, if his per- 
sonality is the product or effect of a colloca- 
tion of particles of highly organised chemical 
constitution wrought up into the elaborate 
mechanism of the brain, it follows, of course, 
that the dissipation of these particles means 
the dissipation of the man himself. 



%m 



CHAPTEE IX 

IMMOETALITY AND HUMAN NATURE 

In the preceding chapter we have been listen- 
ing to the discouraging inferences which 
some biologists and psycho-physicists have 
drawn from their respective sciences. But 
we may find reassurance in the reflection that 
these sciences are concerned not with essen- 
tial man, only with aspects of him, abstrac- 
tions from the concrete reality — man. To 
pierce to the core of human nature we must 
listen to the students of the spiritual life. 
" What, then, is man? " asks Carlyle. " He 
endures but for an hour and is crushed be- 
fore the moth. Yet in the being and in the 
working of a faithful man is there already 
(as all faith from the beginning gives assur- 
ance) a something that pertains not to this 
wild death-element of time, that triumphs 
over time, and is and will be when time shall 

253 



THE MODERN MIND 

be no more." Nor is this the mere enthusi- 
astic utterance of an imaginative mind. Ke- 
flection assures us that all the sciences — 
physical, chemical, biological — are them- 
selves products, not of unconscious unreason, 
but of conscious, rational life. Blot out from 
the universe self-conscious mind and these 
sciences disappear, and while doubtless some 
entity would remain, we may be sure it would 
be no entity of which we can form the slight- 
est conception. What is this mysterious 
principle which antedates everything and 
which seems to be the only kind of being that 
is its own raison d'etre and exists in its own 
right? Of all the wonders in the universe, 
this organisation of psychic energies wedded 
to a material organism to which we give the 
name of personality, is the most wonderful. 
"We may best conceive it as a centre of 
energy, conscious of itself, rounding itself 
into a self-contained personal individuality. 
Whence comes this capacity for self-con- 
sciousness? Evolution cannot explain it. It 

254 



IMMORTALITY AND NATURE 

can only show how it develops. It is im- 
possible to believe that personal self-hood 
can be created by any number of material 
forces, themselves absolutely impersonal. 
The more this self-conscious spiritual energy 
is studied, the more astonishing its powers 
appear. It is conscious of successive ex- 
periences, is able to grasp them as an in- 
telligible unity which yet it transcends. Nay, 
more, it grasps not only things that are, but 
also things that might be, distinguishes be- 
tween the possible and the impossible, yet 
knows itself not identical with any of its 
states. It is a self-unifying power, conscious 
of being not a mere series of psychic events, 
but of being a spiritual and personal whole. 
It is by his power of thought that man wres- 
tles with the complexity and subtlety of nat- 
ural phenomena and wrings out of them 
order, beauty, a cosmos in which he is at 
home everywhere. The astronomer's physi- 
cal frame is confined by the walls of his ob- 
servatory, but his mind sweeps the orbit of 

255 



THE MODERN MIND 

the earth, tracks the solar system as it sounds 
its way through boundless space. Nor does 
the Milky Way, the confines of the stellar 
universe, avail to stay the flight of his specu- 
lative imagination. He can pierce through it, 
though his telescope may not, and wonder 
what lies beyond. And if space is powerless 
to limit intelligence, so also is time. Appear- 
ing for a brief and hurried moment, man is 
' ' a being of large discourse, looking before 
and after," able to reconstruct the vanished 
past and make men and empires live again; 
or to press forward into the unknown and be- 
hold visions of worlds not yet realised. A 
creature, like the lowest organisms, of birth, 
growth, decay, and death, product of forces 
that are beyond his control, he yet feels him- 
self independent of nature and of her laws, 
with a reason that reflects as a mirror the 
infinite Thought that besets him on every 
side. We call man a creature of time; and 
in a sense, so he is : but historic philosophy 
assures us that in another and deeper sense 

256 



IMMORTALITY AND NATURE 

he is its creator. The consciousness of time 
is not derived from something outside us and 
independent of us, as uncritical reflection 
supposes; it is the product of our conscious 
souls, the principle by which the soul or- 
ganises its experiences into intelligible rela- 
tions. This means that man is not lost amid 
the endless experiences of sense; he is their 
master and lord, himself the citizen of an 
eternal world. Hence the great creative 
epochs in the realm of intellect have set death 
at naught and proclaimed immortality as 
alone worthy of man's being. The Golden 
Age of Greek philosophy, the Renaissance, 
the German Idealistic movement, culminat- 
ing in Goethe, the personal idealism of Em- 
erson and Carlyle and their disciples — all 
these great stirrings of the human intellect 
have carried with them implicit or explicit 
faith in the life beyond. " Their creative 
work," says Eucken, speaking of the Ger- 
man Humanists, ' ' renders them so conscious 
of their superiority to mere time limitations, 

257 



THE MODERN MIND 

gives them such a feeling of being possessed 
by a power which cannot perish, that they 
find it impossible to admit the entire rever- 
sion of man to nature, or to hold that death 
implies the complete extinction of the spirit- 
ual life. ??1 

But wonderful as is man's power of 
thought, his capacity for ideal character is 
still more wonderful. If conscience can make 
him at times a coward, at other moments it 
makes him a hero. He divines something 
within him which no natural history can ex- 
plain, the categorical imperative, as Kant 
called it, obedience to which issues in a well- 
knit personality, clearly defined and separate 
not only from the shifting scenery of this 
world but from the Infinite God Himself. 
Through the effort to obey conscience we 
gain an ever richer fulness of being. We 
are not merely caused, but are causes. We 
can create character. We can organise and 
spiritualise the raw material given us by 

1 The Problem of Human Life, p. 463. 
258 



IMMORTALITY AND NATURE 

heredity and nature. We can wrestle with 
passion and subdue evil impulse and pour 
into the veins of moral weakness the iron of 
noble purpose. Still more, there are 
times, all too rare, when, as we say, 
we rise above ourselves. The interests 
of life, the dull routine of our daily 
work, the conventions of the social order to 
which we belong, act as inhibitions on our 
deeper psychic energies, and all too success- 
fully conceal the slumbering possibilities of 
moral greatness. But let some catastrophe 
break through convention; let some sudden 
call of duty or affection sound in our slug- 
gish ears, and in a moment the mask is 
thrown off, inward energies awake, and in 
self-forgetting devotion we take up burdens 
and share others' griefs and pour contempt 
on death itself. And what is this but a wit- 
ness of the truth that we are infinitely more 
every moment than we know, that our true 
home is not earth and time, but God and 
eternity? 

259 



THE MODERN MIND 

As we listen to the dictates of conscience, 
we hear it speak in prophetic tones, except 
where it has been outraged by a life of de- 
liberate wrong-doing. It points to another 
order than this, in which every man will re- 
ceive according to his work. It cannot tol- 
erate the supposition that death levels all 
men at last, the just and the unjust, the 
tyrant and his victim, a Nero and a St. Paul, 
a Judas and a St. John, and mingles the dust 
of the noblest and the vilest of humanity in 
the same forgotten grave. I cannot, indeed, 
agree with the distinguished American di- 
vine when, in the spirit of some of the early 
Christian writers, he says : "If there is no 
reasonable basis for belief in a life after 
death ... if into that sleep no dreams can 
come, then I for one am ready to justify 
suicide and to declare that the greatest fools 
are those who deny themselves any pleasure 
that will not in this life give them pain. ' ' * 

1 A. H. Bradford: Heredity and Christian Problems, 
p. 238. 

260 



IMMORTALITY AND NATURE 

This is surely to misconceive the founda- 
tions on which a genuinely moral life rests. 
Goodness is goodness, quite apart from con- 
sequences—good for the life that now is, 
quite apart from consideration of the life to 
come. Purity, self-sacrifice, a love of truth 
—these things are in themselves good and 
valid, and the soul feels that they must be 
held fast even though the whole material uni- 
verse should conspire to contradict them. 
To abandon the life of goodness or to commit 
suicide because of a waning faith in immor- 
tality, is to despise the best means by which 
such a faith can be generated. Devotion to 
duty, the noble bearing of pain, the doing of 
God's will even in the darkest night when 
not a single star is visible in the heavens, 
is the discipline which raises within the soul 
the great hope that such high endeavours 
cannot end in dust and nothingness. On the 
other hand, it must be admitted, that except 
in the case of a few select spirits, sin and 
goodness cannot have the same significance 

261 



THE MODERN MIND 

to the man who believes as to the man who 
does not believe in a future life. If I believe 
that in the long run it makes no difference 
whether I have fought for God or for the 
devil, I may fight on nerved by a kind of 
grim stoicism; but it will be with a feeling 
of despair, with a sense that I am already 
defeated. Such a belief carries with it ter- 
rible consequences. It involves a tragedy so 
stupendous that all the dark and sinister 
events of human history beside it are as noth- 
ing. " The prophets, the martyrs, their 
noble anguish, vain and meaningless; the 
wise, whose thought strove to eternity and 
was but an idle dream; the pure in heart, 
whose life was a vision of the living God; 
the suffering and the mourners, whose solace 
was in a world to come; the victims of in- 
justice who cried to the Judge Supreme — all 
gone down into silence and the globe that 
bare them circling dead and cold through 
soundless space." 1 

1 Geo. Gissing: The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft, 
p. 179. 

262 



IMMORTALITY AND NATURE 

Such a tragedy is not, indeed, unthinkable, 
but when the idea is fully grasped it pro- 
vides its own antidote; for on such a sup- 
position the world is not merely an enigma, 
it is an enigma without a meaning, a riddle 
without any solution, a mystery forever hid- 
den from human apprehension. Our moral 
experience on such a tragic supposition can- 
not be harmonised, and the impulse or de- 
mand of human nature for harmony is itself 
a delusion. Did such a conviction seize hold 
of the minds of men, human action would be 
smitten with an incurable paralysis, and 
moral chaos would be our lot. The very 
principles by virtue of which we are able 
to redeem human life from confusion and 
despair are the very principles which con- 
strain us to believe that a man's earthly ex- 
perience is but a fragment of his spiritual 
history. 

The essence of man's being is not only 
thought and righteousness: it is also love. 
And love, it is universally confessed, is 

263 



THE MODERN MIND 

divine if there is anything divine in 
the universe. There is an infinitude in 
love which demands infinite scope for 
its exercise. We begin by loving parent 
and friend, but go on to love wife and 
child and home. But the more we love, 
the more capacity for love grows, and if it 
is not to die, it must reach out and embrace 
humanity and God. Can we believe that such 
an energy as this must at last lie beaten in 
the dust? Can death conquer at last the 
power that more than once in history has 
laughed it to scorn? It is conceivable that 
love would accept annihilation for itself if 
the order of the world so demands — accept 
it with firm submission, however hard such 
a fate might seem. But there is one thing 
it could not and would not tolerate, and that 
is the annihilation of the being loved. "Who 
that has watched by the death-bed of one 
whom he has loved, and marked the fading 
away of all that made the loved one dear, 
has not felt a wrath against death, as against 

264 



IMMORTALITY AND NATURE 

a supreme injustice? And what is this feel- 
ing but the testimony of our nature to the 
indestructible worth of personality? 

11 If Death were seen 
At first as Death, Love had not been, 
Or been in narrowest working shut. — 
Mere fellowship of sluggish mind. ' ' x 

Very significant is the reflection that if 
death is conqueror at last, it is not the coarse, 
the selfish, the materialistic who will suffer, 
but those of sensitive affection and tender 
conscience, who cannot tolerate the thought 
that men and women who have never had a 
chance here will find no fresh opportunity 
elsewhere. Do you say: "'I am conscious 
of no craving for a post-mortem existence. 
This life has been rich and full, a banquet 
of the gods. I am satisfied and want no 
more? " Be it so. But what of the others, 
for whom existence has been a long cruci- 
fixion; the victims of that most terrible of 
all tragedies, suppression of the intellectual 
and spiritual energies by the brute force of 

1 In Memoriam, stanza 35. 
265 



THE MODERN MIND 

heredity and circumstance? Think of the 
myriads predestined to pauperism and crime, 
" damned into this world and damned 
through it," — can we believe that they are 
also damned out of it? Call up in imagina- 
tion the hospitals, where men and women 
bear the burden of incurable disease, insane 
asylums, where tortured spirits cry out in 
agony. Pass into the slums and purlieus of 
any of our great cities, and mark there the 
dwarfed and gin-sodden forms through which 
degraded souls look out at you, and the 
only power that will save you from madness 
and despair is the faith that sin and suffer- 
ing are not the last act of the human drama, 
but that behind the veil God has in reserve 
resources of blessing and consolation, that 
men and women cursed here by a fatal heri- 
tage will there find an open door, a fresh 
chance to win the secret of life. The only 
assumption that can annul the force of this 
argument is that the universe at heart is 
neither rational nor moral, or, what comes 

266 



IMMORTALITY AND NATURE 

to the same thing, that the tragedy of our 
humanity is played in an infinite void, with- 
out a purpose and signifying nothing. The 
revolt of the soul against such a ghastly 
imagination is a witness in behalf of a nobler 
thought. 

It is when we enter the sphere of religion 
that the idea of a future life becomes even 
more insistent and is alone sufficient to meet 
the deepest demand of the soul. The pro- 
foundest necessities of the human spirit 
come latest into the light of clear conscious- 
ness. " That was not first which is spiritual, 
but that which is natural, and afterward that 
which is spiritual." 1 Hence, as man's re- 
ligious consciousness grows his conception of 
a future life becomes more and more spirit- 
ual. Now, Christianity, which is the highest 
expression of the religious spirit, is also the 
religion of immortality. It is frequently said 
that Jesus has very little to say about eternal 
life, and theologians are hard pressed to ac- 

1 I. Cor. xv, 46. 

267 



THE MODERN MIND 

count for this reticence. Tolstoi goes the 
length of saying that the idea of immortality 
is foreign to the thought of Jesus and is no 
genuine element of the Christian religion. So 
far from this being true, it were more cor- 
rect to say that the eternal issues of life, 
the imminence of a kingdom into which all 
destined to immortal blessedness must pass, 
were the background of all His teaching. For 
Him the end, the winding up of human his- 
tory and the inauguration of a supernatural 
kingdom, a new heaven and a new earth, 
were events at the door. His ironic and 
paradoxical attitude towards life, as seen in 
a pessimism arising out of a profound dis- 
content with the present order of things, yet 
implying a deeper optimism, a faith in the 
power and goodness of God, His teaching 
about property and charity and self-sacrifice, 
His ethical doctrine as a whole — all these were 
explicable only in the light of His belief that 
the natural order is liable at any moment to 
vanish before the onset of spiritual powers 

268 



IMMORTALITY AND NATURE 

which for the moment God is holding in check 
and which when realised will mark the end 
of all that is mortal, the beginning of an 
order that is immortal. 1 

Unquestionably, Jesus took over the ideas 
about the end of the world and the establish- 
ment of the Kingdom of God from the late 
Jewish Apocalyptic literature, though His 
mind, we may be sure, was too spiritual to 
take literally the fantastic forms with which 
these ideas were clothed. The form of His 
expectation was disappointed. The Church 
looked in vain for His return in visible glory. 
Nevertheless, in a deeper sense His King- 
dom did come. The death upon the cross, 
which seemed to be the ruin of all His hopes, 
became the instrument of His victory, the 
most potent means of founding the Kingdom 
as an imperishable fact destined to survive 
all the catastrophes of history. The escha- 
tological hope of the men of the first century 
was destined to perish; but well has it been 

*Mark xiii, 30; ix, 1; Matthew x, 23. 

269 



THE MODERN MIND 

said that " in its death-pangs eschatology 
bore to the Greek genius a wonder-child, the 
mystic, sensuous, early Christian doctrine of 
immortality, and consecrated Christianity as 
the religion of immortality to take the place 
of the slowly dying civilisation of the ancient 
world. ' ' 1 

While the thought of Jesus is permeated 
with the reality of the world beyond, com- 
pared with which this present world seems 
to Him as insubstantial as a cloud, He has 
but little to say as to its precise conditions 
and circumstances. How could the condi- 
tions of the other world be expressed 
or made intelligible in human language? 
Moreover, must we not believe that in 
matters which had no practical bearing 
on religion Christ's knowledge was lim- 
ited, as it was in matters of science 
and historical criticism? As a matter of fact, 
religious history shows, as in the case of 
ancient Egypt, that a people may have what 

1 Schweitzer: The Quest of the Historical Jesus, p. 254. 

270 



IMMORTALITY AND NATURE 

assumes to be the most precise knowledge 
of the state of matters beyond the grave with- 
out experiencing thereby any particular 
moral stimulus. On the other hand, He lets 
drop some hints which have great ethical 
weight. For example, in the Parable of Dives 
and Lazarus he affirms the psychic continuity 
and identity of character. Abraham can say 
to Lazarus : ' ' Son, remember ! ' ' But "mem- 
ory " means that the man after death is in 
all essential matters the same man as before 
death; and the inference is inevitable that' 
here and now man makes for himself the 
conditions of his future life. In His argu- 
ment with the Sadducee His words are at once 
critical of the popular Pharisaic and of the 
sceptical Sadducean view of the resurrec- 
tion of the dead. As against the Pharisaic 
notion of a material resurrection He teaches 
that earthly appetites and a physical body, 
necessary for the present life, will disappear; 
that only the soul lives on and inherits the 
Kingdom of God. As against the Sadducean 

271 



THE MODERN MIND 

unbelief in a future life, He shows the cer- 
tainty of personal continuance after death. 
To Him it is inconceivable that a creature 
who has once been the object of Divine favour 
should go down into annihilation. God de- 
clares Himself to Moses as being the God 
of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob ; but there 
was much more in this saying than met the 
eye. The God who has been the God of these 
ancient men while they were on earth will 
be also their God beyond death. Therefore, 
in the strict sense these men are not dead 
but living. Death is only a veil that hides 
the reality of life. Life is the ultimate fact 
in the universe: death is but a passing epi- 
sode. Christ's great word is based on the 
idea that belief in God and belief in a future 
life stand or fall together. Experience shows 
this to be a fact. In proportion as the belief 
in God is strong, lofty, and dominant, the 
belief in a future life gains in intensity and 
clearness. Where God is regarded as un- 
knowable, or where the sense of His per- 

272 



IMMORTALITY AND NATURE 

sonality is weakened and law or energy or 
some other impersonal entity takes His place, 
faith in immortality suffers and eventually 
fades away. If we accept Christ's revelation 
of a God perfect in love and wisdom, we must 
believe that He means all souls to share His 
blessedness. He proclaims God as a Father 
whose essence is self-sacrificing love, and 
who as the inspiration and unifying bond of 
all souls, gives himself eternally to each. 
And just because of this, man is a reality, 
not a nonentity. In other words, he is free 
to realise his God-given nature, and the Di- 
vine love can put no barriers in the way of 
his upward growth, for this love has called 
him into being and makes him a partaker in 
its riches. 

All students of the New Testament are 
agreed that Christianity is built on the faith 
of the early disciples, that Jesus, who was 
crucified and buried, broke the bonds of death 
and reappeared on earth. They differ as to 
whether this belief corresponded to any ob- 

273 



THE MODERN MIND 

jective fact, or was merely a psychological 
illusion. No one, however, disputes the fact 
that had it not been for faith in the Besurrec- 
tion the cause of Jesus would have perished 
with Him in His grave. The tradition of 
the event which has come down to us in the 
Gospels is disjointed, incoherent, and frag- 
mentary. Under critical analysis it threat- 
ens to break up and dissolve away. But an- 
other and an older tradition is preserved in 
a document the authenticity of which is un- 
contested. Paul's First Epistle to the Corin- 
thians takes us back to within twenty-five 
years of the death of Jesus; and in this 
Epistle the writer sets forth in grave and 
measured language the common Gospel of 
the Eesurrection. No criticism can over- 
throw the testimony here adduced. St. Paul 
tells us that Christ rose from the dead and 
appeared to Peter and to five hundred dis- 
ciples at once, the majority of whom were liv- 
ing at the time he wrote. And in the later 
tradition preserved in the Gospels we have 

274 



IMMORTALITY AND NATURE 

subtle corroboration of the appearance to 
Peter. It was this manifestation which 
marked a critical turning-point in the history 
of Christianity. Let us recall the situation. 
After the crucifixion, Peter and the rest fled. 
The death of their Master meant ruin, ir- 
remediable and absolute. It was not His 
death merely that paralysed their faith, it 
was the thought that He died on the cross. 
Such a death was the Divine refutation of 
His Messianic scheme, and branded his life- 
work as a futility. A few weeks passed by, 
and these despairing souls gathered together 
and confronted their enemies with the as- 
tounding message: " The Crucified is risen.' ' 
On this faith, as all admit, the Church was 
founded. To-day Christianity embraces 
about one-third of the human race, and that 
third the most progressive and most enlight- 
ened. Not only so, but all civilised men, in 
proportion to the height of culture attained 
by them, are looking toward Christianity or 
toward some religion of which Christianity 

275 



THE MODERN MIND 

is the germ, as the future world-religion. 
These are indisputable facts. What sort of 
a world must it be if these great historical 
phenomena turn out to be founded not on 
some reality, but on the excited fancy of a 
hallacinee, as Renan calls Mary Magdalene? 
No ! reflection insists that an adequate cause 
must be granted, and returns again and again 
to the thought that something must have hap- 
pened after the Crucifixion to bring into ex- 
istence such a mighty faith. What was that 
something? Now, the permanent value of 
belief in the Resurrection cannot lie in the 
manner or mode of its accomplishment. 
Whether Christ rose from the dead in the 
same physical organism which was laid in 
the tomb, or whether His body dissolved, as 
ours will do, and He himself issued from the 
kingdom of the dead clothed in a spiritual 
body; whether He revealed Himself out- 
wardly or only inwardly to His Disciples — 
these things are not vital to Christian 
thought and faith, and therefore the signifi- 

276 



IMMORTALITY AND NATURE 

cance of the Resurrection cannot lie in them. 
Where, then, does it lie? It lies in the con- 
viction generated by the Spirit of God 
through some real though not necessarily 
physical appearance of the Saviour, that He 
still lived, that He had broken the barriers 
of the grave, that He was still a power in the 
world. Do you say such an event is against 
all experience and therefore incredible ? But 
we live in a world full of mysteries, and no 
event can be deemed incredible that is not 
impossible in the nature of things. What 
do we know of life or death, that we can say 
what is possible or impossible in these mys- 
terious realms ? What do we know of perfect 
goodness and absolute oneness with God, that 
we dare assert that not even the one per- 
fectly good being this earth has known could 
not recross the barriers of the Beyond to 
save from shipwreck the faith of those who 
had staked their dearest hopes upon His 
cause? Whether the evidence for the Resur- 
rection will win our faith depends to some 

277 



THE MODERN MIND 

extent on the presuppositions with which we 
come to the evidence. If we believe in God 
and in the reality of another world we will 
have little difficulty in believing in a real 
manifestation of Jesus Christ in the world 
of sense after His death. What is the rela- 
tion between the fact of the Eesurrection of 
Christ and the belief in a future life? The 
popular theology relates the two as cause 
and effect; but we have seen that the belief 
in immortality springs out of the deepest 
instincts of the soul and is quite independent 
of this or that historical event. And yet 
the early followers of Jesus felt that His 
Eesurrection had brought immortality to 
light — that is, had invested the idea with a 
clearness and vividness hitherto unknown. 
And, as a matter of historical fact, belief in 
immortality has been strongest, has coloured 
life and activity most deeply, in proportion 
as faith in Christ has been strong and vigor- 
ous. " Whatever/' says Harnack, " may 
have happened at the grave and in the matter 

#78 



IMMORTALITY AND NATURE 

of the appearances, one thing is certain — 
from this grave has sprung the indestructible 
faith in the overthrow of death and in an 
eternal life. . . . Wherever to-day against 
all the impressions of nature there exists a 
strong faith in the infinite worth of the soul, 
wherever death has lost its terrors, wherever 
the sufferings of this world are measured 
against a future glory, there is bound up 
with these vital feelings the conviction that 
Jesus Christ has forced his way through 
death; that God has awakened Him and 
raised Him to life and glory." 1 It is true 
that this is a conviction rather than a demon- 
stration, and there is still much left to per- 
plex our minds. But so it must be. Not to 
man the thinker, but to man the believer, the 
hero of moral struggles and the child of God, 
to man able to make the sublime venture of 
faith, the Easter message comes with power 
to confirm the prophecies and set its seal 
upon the ineradicable instincts of the soul. 

1 Das Wesen des Christentums, p. 102. 

279 



THE MODERN MIND 

For that message assures us that whatever 
else death may take from us, it is powerless 
to dim the great realities of Home and Love 
and Brotherhood, or quench the vital energy 
of a spirit born of God and shielded by His 
goodness. 



280 



CHAPTER X 

RELIGION IN MODERN SOCIETY 

There is no more urgent question than the 
place and function of religion in the modern 
world. Some persons affect to think that 
the day of religion is past, and that at 
best it may still be tolerated as a valuable 
police measure to keep the humbler classes 
in order, or as an attractive element in the 
aesthetic outfit of the feminine mind. With 
such persons there is no argument here. 
They must be referred to a deeper study of 
the human soul and of the tendencies of their 
age. The great mass of men are convinced 
that religion is a reality. Their difficulties 
arise when they try to understand religion, 
and above all, when they try to bring it into 
vital relations with the whole realm of ex- 
perience. What men are asking to-day is 

281 



THE MODERN MIND 

this: Granted the reality of religion, what 
is its contribution to modern life? 

Now, the institution which claims to repre- 
sent the Christian religion, to incarnate the 
spirit of its Founder, and to realise His 
ideals, is the Church. There is a widespread 
feeling that the Church is not substantiating 
these claims. When its achievements are set 
alongside the life and work of the Son of 
Man, they appear to be seriously deficient, 
both in quantity and in quality. We have 
already seen that Jesus brings a message 
with two aspects, corresponding to life in its 
normal, healthy, and ordered state, and to 
life in its abnormal, disordered, unhealthy 
state. Is the Church adequately represent- 
ing its Master in both of these elements of 
His Gospel? If not, why not? 

The prophetic side of Christ's ministry is 
represented to-day in the office of the 
preacher. How far, then, does modern 
preaching realise the aims of .Christ in call- 
ing men to virtue, in solving their doubts 

282 



RELIGION IN SOCIETY 

and perplexities, in revealing to them new 
vistas of truth and in leading them to new 
moral achievements? A glance at history- 
shows the great things that sermons have 
done in the past. They have made kings and 
potentates feel the stings of an awakened 
conscience. They have created great revivals 
of religion, in which thousands have been 
swept into the Kingdom. They have moved 
peoples to undertake the work of self-re- 
generation. They have strengthened the 
patriot's arm, turned cowards into heroes, 
filled with a holy enthusiasm against evil the 
hearts of multitudes. They have brought 
light to the perplexities, and assuagement to 
the miseries of their time. Is the power 
of preaching gone forever? Is the hu- 
man voice bereft of its ancient magic when 
it would plead for the sublimest realities 
within the compass of human imagination? 
There are, indeed, causes for misgiving. 
The situation is paradoxical. Never were 
men more preoccupied by religious and 

283 



THE MODERN MIND 

ethical problems than now, and never were 
they more anxious to hear the helpful 
and the enlightening word about God, 
the soul, the art of right living, the signifi- 
cance of life here, and the hope of a life here- 
after. The agnosticism which threatened to 
paralyse the spiritual energies of the genera- 
tion passing away has disappeared. The 
mystery of the universe has once again fallen 
upon man and has challenged him to find 
some answer to the age-long quest. Never 
was there such an opportunity of leadership 
for the preacher as the present affords. But 
the sad confession must be made that it is 
not to the pulpit that men look to-day for a 
solution of their urgent problems. The pro- 
fessor's lecture, the review article, the newer 
drama, the formal treatise — it is these that 
have assumed the power which once the pul- 
pit owned. And yet the Word of God is not 
bound, though its preachers are. And there 
are signs that a renascence of religious elo- 
quence is at hand, strong enough to voice the 

284 



RELIGION IN SOCIETY 

aspirations and inspire the energies of the 
modern world. In this rebirth of the 
preacher's art for which we long, we may be 
sure that two weaknesses which at present 
disfigure it will disappear. In the first place, 
it will be marked by sound and thorough 
religious thinking, by the note of intellectual 
conviction, which is too absent to-day. It is 
hard to escape the feeling that the average 
preacher has never been inspired with a 
sense of the ethical and intellectual gran- 
deur of Christianity, has never realised its 
boundless wealth of truth which, touching 
man at every point, lifts him out of time into 
eternity and satisfies the craving of the in- 
tellect for unity, largeness, and power. Read 
any of the great preachers who have made a 
mark upon their own and succeeding genera- 
tions — Chrysostom, Baxter, Edwards, Chan- 
ning, Phillips Brooks — and you will find 
that beneath their flowers of eloquence, 
their poetry and mysticism, their glowing 
fervour of appeal, there is a solid substruc- 

285 



THE MODERN MIND 

ture of ideas, an order of majestic truths, 
which gives a solidity and massive splendour 
to the discourse. The cry of the hour is for 
men who will do for our time what these 
men did for theirs, who will re-study and re- 
vitalise the regnant ideas of the Gospel of 
Christ, who will steep them in the living 
realities of experience and make them once 
more the possession of heart and conscience. 
The second weakness which in the coming 
time will disappear from the pulpit will be 
its lack of positive suggestions, of practical 
effectiveness in bringing religious ideas to 
bear upon life. The temperament of the 
preacher is such that he is liable to be so 
absorbed in the ideal aspects of truth as to 
neglect the scientific and practical means 
by which the truth may be realised. Presi- 
dent King rightly charges much preaching 
with being a " mere exhortation, giving no 
practical suggestion of positive achieve- 
ment. ' ' 1 It is being more and more recog- 

1 Rational Living, p. 188. 
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RELIGION IN SOCIETY 

nised that law obtains in the spiritual no less 
than in the natural realm. Hence, the mod- 
ern man is anxious to know what these spirit- 
ual laws are and how they may be utilised 
for the enrichment and expansion of life. 
To take one concrete illustration. Eecent 
science has proved that the law of habit is of 
profound significance in the religious, as in 
other spheres of life. Hence, it is of vital im- 
portance that people should know how this 
law operates — what is its basis, how evil 
habits may be dropped and good habits culti- 
vated. It is not enough to glorify the face of 
goodness. Men must be taught the methods 
by which they can make goodness their own. 
The pulpit that is to command the respect of 
the world to-day must be rich in suggestive- 
ness, in scientific aim; in hints that make 
for practice. 

Let us now turn to the other aspect of 
Christ's message. We have seen that al- 
though Jesus moved among all classes, high 
and low, rich and poor, with the ease and 

287 



THE MODERN MIND 

freedom of a comrade, yet there were certain 
groups that lay especially close to His heart 
— the destitute, the sick, the unfortunate. 
He spent no small part of His time in com- 
forting and relieving these. In the great 
Judgment scene 1 He identifies Himself with 
the poor, the sick, the criminal, the unhappy 
in mind or body, or both; and He makes the 
final destiny of men to depend on their atti- 
tude to Him, as represented by these classes. 
" Inasmuch as ye did it or did it not to one 
of the least of these, ye did it or did it not 
unto Me." Here, then, is the searching, sift- 
ing question: Is the Church to these classes 
to-day what Jesus Christ was in Palestine? 
Here are three problems which confront the 
Church to-day : The problem of poverty ; the 
problem of sickness; and the problem of 
crime. 

(1) What message has religion, as repre- 
sented by the Church, for the poor, and what 
has it to say about poverty? The problem 

1 Matthew xxv, 31-46. 
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RELIGION IN SOCIETY 

of the poor, which is so insistent in modern 
society, receives small notice in the teaching 
of Christ. He views everything in the light 
of the dazzling vision of a regenerated social 
state from which the pressing cares and 
bodily sufferings of men would be forever 
banished. The poor in spirit are the true 
heirs of the untold riches of the coming king- 
dom. Let Caesar have his own — what mat- 
ters? The phantasmagoria of life passes 
quickly. The soul's enduring possession is 
in God. Christ's message was not primarily 
concerned with material welfare, but rather 
with detachment from material thraldom. 
In His own utter detachment from material 
things, in His perfect renunciation of all 
forms of self-hood, are His liberty, His 
power, His oneness with the Father. The 
early Church glorified poverty, yet it heaped 
up mountains of riches. It taught renuncia- 
tion, yet it grasped the sceptre of Caesar. 
Hence came about a great distortion of His 
teaching. Jesus justified poverty in so far 

289 



THE MODERN MIND 

as it lessened the chances of slavery to the 
things of sense. In itself it was not a good, 
yet as the servant of the will it might minister 
to the needs of the spirit. But the Church 
made poverty an end in itself, with the result 
that all life became impoverished and the 
healthy instincts of human nature crippled. 
In Christ's view, the mission of poverty was 
to ennoble life, to make man larger, happier, 
and more effective. But it could only achieve 
its mission when self-imposed, as part of 
life's discipline, and as opening into higher 
regions of activity and happiness and spirit- 
ual freedom. Our Lord, in asking the rich 
young man to sell all that he had and give 
to the poor, was not suppressing natural feel- 
ings, but was opening to the soul the gates 
of a new life. 

Poverty, as we know it to-day, however, 
presents quite a different aspect. It lies as 
an intolerable load on multitudes of God's 
children. It involves no exercise of the will, 
no choice of the higher good, and offers no 

290 



RELIGION IN SOCIETY 

outlet into larger freedom. It degrades, de- 
bases, and enslaves man. It pollutes and 
destroys, but no longer emancipates. It 
often leads to temptation, sin, crime, and 
suicide. It is the product of social injustice 
and inequalities which embitter life at both 
ends of the scale. The poverty that is 
wrought into the very structure of modern 
society does, indeed, detach men from ma- 
terial treasures, but it brings no enrichment 
to the soul. What has the Church to say 
to the ten millions of poverty-stricken per- 
sons in the United States, four millions of 
whom would starve were it not for the inter- 
vention of the State? The Church is deeply 
concerned in this matter, for abject poverty 
well-nigh sterilises the moral and spiritual 
influences which might otherwise bless and 
sanctify the vast stretches of hopeless and 
unimaginative toil. But poverty that is 
freely accepted at the bidding of some lofty 
inspiration is one thing : whereas the poverty 
which strips life of opportunity, creates sad- 

291 



THE MODERN MIND 

ness and misunderstanding, forbids the 
simple pleasures of the home, shuts up the 
sufferer in a solitude and shadows his path 
with fear and despair, is another and a very 
different thing. Take one fact alone. There 
are five million workingwomen in this coun- 
try. A large proportion of these exist (they 
can scarcely be said to live) in rotting and 
crowded tenements, bereft of the commonest 
decencies. How can these poor women know 
any of the joys of the spirit, or any freedom 
of thought, or any sense of the worth and 
dignity of life? If the Church is to carry 
out, is to realise the aim of its Founder, it 
must apply to the life conditions of these 
and such as these, the truths of the Christian 
Gospel. 

First of all, it is the duty of the Church 
to proclaim the sacredness of all men in 
God's eyes, to crown each with direct and 
personal responsibility for his own immortal 
destiny, to found the structure of human 
society upon a law of love (which, indus- 

292 



RELIGION IN SOCIETY 

trially, is the law of co-operation), and to 
drive out greed and selfishness from the 
hearts of men. So far as poverty is a malig- 
nant power, cankering the heart with care, 
filling life with dread, paralysing the soul, 
dividing man from man, shutting God out of 
His world and making it impossible for mil- 
lions of His children to commune with Him, 
in just so far is it a power against which 
the Church must pit its energies and wage 
relentless war. Hence, it is the duty of the 
Church to utter no uncertain sound on the 
great industrial and social problems. Must 
it, then, identify itself with the doctrine of 
Socialism in any of its forms? By no means. 
For while Christ's teaching meets at many 
points modern social strivings, the creed of 
Christ is not the creed of Socialism. If the 
Church cannot afford to be an instrument of 
Socialistic propaganda, still less can it afford 
to stand aloof from the great industrial and 
social problems, such as Child Labour, Con- 
gested Tenement Districts, Factory and Mill 

293 



THE MODERN MIND 

Systems, the Physical and Moral Education 
of Youth. 

Secondly, to the Church is committed the 
task of proclaiming the moral structure of 
the universe, the eternal justice of God which 
lies at the heart of things. Hence the Church 
must insist on justice as an essential part of 
a state organised on Christian principles. 
The Church itself is dependent, for the most 
part, on the well-to-do, in order that it may 
carry on its beneficent enterprises. Yet if, 
notwithstanding its need of material support, 
it falters in proclaiming the absoluteness of 
the ideal in the social order, if it fails to insist 
that the industrial order is not a section of 
life governed by principles of its own, but 
ultimately rests upon a moral order the cen- 
tral principle of which is justice, it is dis- 
loyal to its Master. 

Thirdly, the Church must become once 
more Christ's almoner to the poor. It must 
not be content with taking care of the few 
destitute people belonging to its membership. 

£94 



RELIGION IN SOCIETY 

It must brace itself for the task of bringing 
into the homes of all the poverty-ridden 
classes not only the relief that is needed, but 
the spiritual influence, the moral uplift of 
Christian sympathy. The work of minister- 
ing to the poor must no longer be left ex- 
clusively to Charitable Boards and Associa- 
tions, excellent in many respects though the 
work of these may be. The Church can do 
something for the poor that these organisa- 
tions cannot do. It can console the unhappy, 
and the destitute, and train the soul in the 
spiritual values of life. It can remove fear 
and misgiving from the heart. It can bring 
peace to the distracted spirit through a sense 
of fellowship and brotherhood. 1 

(2) Let us now consider the Church's re- 
lation to sickness. We owe to Christian 

1 To those who are interested in the relation of the 
Church to the social problem, I would commend F. I. 
Paradise's brilliant treatise on The Church and the In- 
dividual; F. G. Peabody's restrained but masterly dis- 
cussion, Jesus Christ and the Social Question, and W. 
Rauschenbush's striking appeal, Christianity and the 
Social Crisis, 

295 



THE MODERN MIND 

Science the new emphasis on this urgent 
problem. We may denounce this cult as an 
unmitigated curse, a foe to true religion, a 
materialising of spiritual things, but in so 
doing we are merely mistaking a symptom 
for a disease. Dangerous as Christian 
Science undoubtedly is to the higher 
interests of religion, there are things still 
more dangerous, and those are the forces that 
have brought Christian Science into exist- 
ence and that still operate in the churches. 
Only by destroying these forces will one cut 
at the roots of this heresy. A strained in- 
tellectualism that has been the especial bane 
of New England theology ; a materialisic tra- 
dition in academic medicine; a lack on the 
part of organised Christianity of that primi- 
tive quality on which our Lord laid so much 
emphasis, — faith, — with a consequent failure 
to deliver men and women from burdens 
which God has not imposed; a refusal by the 
Church to test itself honestly by the char- 
acter and work of its Lord and Master, and 

296 



RELIGION IN SOCIETY 

so an inability to follow His example in 
bringing His influence to bear on life as a 
whole — these are the main causes of this 
strange mixture of crude metaphysics, un- 
critical theology, irrational dialectic, absurd 
therapeutics, and unbalanced mysticism. 1 
We may be sure that in turning to Christian 
Science, the starving soul is looking for some- 
thing it cannot find in the historic Churches. 
To what straits it must be driven when it 
can feed on food such as this! As a young 
student of divinity I learned from Robert- 
son of Brighton that at the root of all or- 
ganised error there is a truth which gives 
it its power, makes it credible, and invests 
it with a lease of indefinite perpetuity. Chris- 
tian Science will die, not by the rhetoric that 
only condemns, but by the insight that sees 
into its causes and interprets correctly its 
misguided efforts. How, then, can the 

x The Eev. Lyman Powell, who has studied Christian 
Science more deeply and criticised it more trenchantly 
than any other writer, allows me to say that he heartily 
concurs in the above judgment. 

297 



THE MODERN MIND 

Church do this? By a return to the spirit 
and method of Jesus Christ. For Him, man 
in essence is a spiritual being whose " most 
serious concerns are those of character." 
But He recognised, and the Church must 
recognise, that the spiritual life has mental 
and bodily conditions; that once these con- 
ditions are disordered, barriers are some- 
times erected between the soul and God and 
a truly religious life is made well-nigh im- 
possible. Must the Church acquiesce silently 
in this condition of things, if, by its higher 
faith, it can free the soul from obsessions 
and restore it to religious peace and service ? 
Here there is no question of intruding into 
the sphere of the physician. But what we 
must ask is : Ought not the Church to bring 
to the sufferer what the wise physician wishes 
for him — a new outlook upon life, the energis- 
ing of faith, a sense of self-control? Take 
one of the great curses of modern civilisation 
— alcoholism. The preacher denounces it as a 
sin; but the scientific man who has studied 

298 



RELIGION IN SOCIETY 

its phenomena, views it as a semi-physical, 
semi-moral disorder. It is almost impossible 
to exaggerate the physical, mental, and 
spiritual evil which alcoholism produces. 
The pathologist, the neurologist, the physi- 
ologist, the psychiatrist, the criminologist, 
the moralist, the religious worker and re- 
former, join in an unanimous chorus of con- 
demnation. Everybody knows that ordinary 
medical methods can do little for the victim 
of this disease ; but everybody may not know 
that all scientific authorities to-day recognise 
that in religious faith we have a powerful 
therapeutic agent. As Professor James 
quotes, from some medical authority: "The 
only radical remedy I know for dipsomania 
is religio-mania." 1 Is the Church, then, to 
content itself with denouncing the drunkard, 
or even with such fragmentary and super- 
ficial remedies as temperance societies and 
open-air missions? On the contrary, it must 
go down beside the drunkard, and at the ex- 
1 Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 269 (footnote). 

299 



THE MODERN MIND 

penditure of personal service and sympathy 
and training, it must inspire him with a de- 
sire for help, and bring to him the help thus 
desired. And what the Church can do and 
ought to do for the drunkard, it can do and 
ought to do for thousands who are suffering 
as the drunkard suffers, from diseases of 
character, invasions of personality by some 
evil power which the message of Christ, 
properly applied, can cast out and keep 
out. 

(3) The relation of the Church to the prob- 
lem of crime and the criminal. Down to the 
middle of the eighteenth century the theory 
of crime, accepted as a commonplace by all 
civilised nations, and against which only an 
occasional voice protested, was that it was a 
wrong done to society which society was 
bound to punish with the utmost rigour. Hav- 
ing discharged the duty of revenge, society 
had no further concern with the wrong-doer. 
It is needless to add that the prisons, under 
the reign of this theory, were scenes of un- 

300 



RELIGION IN SOCIETY 

speakable atrocities. There was scarcely an 
offence that was not punishable by death, and 
by torture preceding death; and in this con- 
dition of affairs Church and State had ac- 
quiesced for centuries. In the year 1764 
there appeared a pamphlet, issued anony- 
mously, but afterwards acknowledged to be 
the work of an Italian nobleman, the Marquis 
Beccaria by name. This work, entitled 
Crimes and Their Punishments, struck a 
blow at received ideas and instituted a proc- 
ess of reform which, however slow and tenta- 
tive, has not ceased from that date to this. 
Beccaria was a true child of the eighteenth 
century. He was a deist and a utilitarian. 
His formula was, " The greatest happiness 
of the greatest number." While he speaks 
with formal respect of religion, it is obvious 
that he has no real belief in it. He views 
crime and the treatment of the criminal 
purely from the standpoint of public utility. 
His aim is to show how the social order may 
be preserved, with the least possible inflic- 

301 



THE MODERN MIND 

tion of pain. A glance at some of the prin- 
ciples which he expounds shows that not even 
yet have we overtaken him. 

" In order that a punishment may attain its 
object, it is enough if the evil of the punishment 
exceeds the advantage of the crime; and in this 
excess of evil the certainty of punishment and the 
loss of possible advantage from the crime ought 
to be considered as part: all beyond this is super- 
fluous and consequently tyrannical. , 

" The more cruel punishments become, the more 
human minds harden, adjusting themselves like 
fluids to the level of the objects around them. 

" The death penalty is neither necessary nor 
expedient. 

" The more speedily and the more nearly in 
connection with the crime committed punishment 
shall follow, the more just and useful it will be. 

" No punishment for a crime can be called ex- 
actly just, that is, necessary, so long as the law has 
not adopted the best possible means in the circum- 
stances of a country to prevent the crimes it 
punishes. 

" Would you prevent crimes? Then cause the 
laws to be clear and simple, bring the whole force 
of a nation to bear on their defence, and suffer no 
part of it to be used in overthrowing them. 

" Another way to prevent crimes is to reward 
virtue. If prizes offered by Academies to the dis- 
coverers of useful truths have caused the multi- 
plication of knowledge and of good books, why 

302 



RELIGION IN SOCIETY 

should not virtuous actions also be multiplied by 
prizes distributed from the munificence of the 
sovereign ? 

" The surest but most difficult means of pre- 
venting crimes is the improvement of education/ ' 

These ideas, diffused throughout Europe 
gradually, wrought a change in men's opin- 
ions. In this country the new leaven began 
to work as soon as the English connection 
had been thrown off. For example, at the 
beginning of the Eevolutionary War there 
were in Pennsylvania nearly twenty crimes 
punishable by death. Eighteen years after 
the close of the war no crime was punishable 
by death except that of murder in the first 
degree. In this reform Pennsylvania was 
simply returning to the ideas of Penn at the 
founding of the colony, ideas which had been 
nullified by the English Government. The 
country, however, generally retained the old 
methods, with some alleviation of the physi- 
cal distress attached to prison life. 

The second great step in prison reform 
we owe to John Howard, the Englishman, 

303 



THE MODERN MIND 

who read and valued highly Beccaria's work. 
It was Howard who, by his researches into 
prison life, aroused at last the conscience of 
his countrymen. The evils which he found 
in the English prisons are beyond descrip- 
tion. Innocent and guilty alike were herded 
together. Prisoners were allowed to obtain 
intoxicating drink, and drunkenness among 
them was almost universal. Hardly any at- 
tempt was made to influence criminals, 
morally or religiously, and the plague from 
time to time swept away large numbers of 
the prison population. Howard was a phi- 
lanthropist, who had not studied the deeper 
questions connected with the causation of 
crime or its cure, but was almost wholly pre- 
occupied with the physical miseries which he 
witnessed. He did a great and ever-to-be- 
remembered work, and his influence still 
lives. 

Modern interest in the treatment of the 
criminal arises from a number of causes. In 
the first place, the scientific interest in the 

304 



RELIGION IN SOCIETY 

nature of man; the rise of a criminal psy- 
chology, especially as represented by the in- 
vestigations of such men as Lombroso and 
Ferri and Havelock Ellis. Their motto is, 
" heredity is the mother of crime, and en- 
vironment is its father." In the second 
place, the new social spirit, which seeks to 
trace the relations of society to the individual 
and to find out how far social conditions 
create vice and crime. In the third place, 
the humanitarian spirit of the age, which 
revolts against the harshness and cruelty of 
earlier times, and which believes that sane 
and normal man has fundamental instincts 
that are good, and that through the cultiva- 
tion of these instincts the evildoer can find a 
way back to normal social life. Lastly, the 
deeper and more spiritual theology of our 
age is slowly but surely undermining the old 
ideas of penalty. When God was regarded 
as an austere Lawgiver, issuing commands 
and exacting obedience through fear of con- 
sequences, it was natural that this theological 

305 



THE MODERN MIND 

conception should be reflected in an unsym- 
pathetic earthly jurisprudence. We have a 
striking illustration of the truth that the 
theology of a man has an important bearing 
upon his idea of crime and its punishment, 
in a recent utterance of Sir Eobert Ander- 
son, the former head of Scotland Yard. This 
expert in the detection of crime believes that 
all " professional criminals," to use his own 
phrase, should be, upon judicial condemna- 
tion, incarcerated for life in a special prison. 
He grounds this idea on the view that these 
men are absolutely incurable. When we turn 
to his religious views, we find that he main- 
tains the validity of the Mosaic ideas of pen- 
alty, and that he has a very inadequate con- 
ception of the incurable optimism of the 
Christian religion. 

On the other hand, it is a pleasure to learn 
that the two great principles underlying the 
modern treatment of crime affirmed by the 
recent International Prison Congress held at 
Washington are these: First, no person, 

306 



RELIGION IN SOCIETY 

whatever his age or record, should be as- 
sumed to be incapable of improvement. Sec- 
ond, it is in the interest of the public not 
merely to impose a sentence which is retribu- 
tive and deterrent, but also to make an earn- 
est effort for the reformation of the criminal. 
To these two principles I believe the time will 
come when a third will be added, and that 
is that the element of penalty should be 
thrown more and more into the background, 
and that all prisons should be conducted on 
industrial, not on retributive lines. Work in 
itself properly adjusted to the aptitudes of 
the individual has a therapeutic effect in 
diverting the mind from wrong ideas, in 
building up a sense of self-respect, in inspir- 
ing the worker with the feeling that he is 
worth something to the world and to himself. 
Prison reformers have never realised the 
splendid possibilities of work as a curative 
agency in moral disorders. If there is one 
fact which emerges clearly and distinctly out 
of the modern discussion of this problem, it 

307 



THE MODERN MIND 

is that the penal system has broken down and 
stands condemned in the eyes of every man 
who has studied it. A high judicial officer 
recently said to a friend of mine: " Every- 
body ought to understand that prisons 
never cure anybody of anything, and that 
nothing as a rule but evil can come to the in- 
dividual from putting him in prison." I 
asked once the governor of an Irish prison 
about the reformative effect of jail life upon 
the inmates. He replied: " This place re- 
forms nobody. It keeps people safe." The 
motto of the new age will be not Penalty, but 
Eeform. Immense as has been the progress 
in prison administration which this century 
has witnessed during the past forty years, 
there is still much work to be done before we 
even approximate to the views of enlightened 
students of the subject. 

But I am here especially concerned with 
the influence of religion upon the prevention 
and cure of crime. In the various institu- 
tions for the punishment of those who have 

308 



RELIGION IN SOCIETY 

fallen under the censure of law — federal 
prisons, state prisons and penitentiaries, re- 
formatories, county jails and workhouses — 
there is a population of some one hundred 
thousand. What has religion, as represented 
by the Church, to say to these people? "I was 
in prison and ye came unto me," says the 
Founder of the Church. He here identifies 
Himself with man, the outcast and the 
criminal. 

Christ would have us know that in every 
outlaw on whom the hand of man lies heavy, 
there is a buried, a hidden Christ, waiting 
to be evoked by the charm of sympathy and 
service. Is the Church carrying out the idea 
of its Master? Do the representatives of 
the Church know the moral and spiritual 
biography of every prisoner in the land? 
Does the criminal, in his loneliness and 
misery, think of the Church as his greatest 
friend? Does it represent to him the 
infinite compassion of God amid the hard- 
ness of man's justice? Do any of the 

309 



THE MODERN MIND 

Church's ministers consecrate themselves to 
the study of the problems of crime and its 
punishment, of the criminal and his psychol- 
ogy? Is the Church taking advantage of 
the humanitarian note which characterises 
the social instincts of the modern world, to 
suggest and inaugurate reform in prison 
methods and in the general relations of the 
State to those whom it would punish? Is 
the Church attacking with all its might the 
causes that produce crime? Is it guarding 
the child against the commercial greed that 
would destroy his childhood? Is it protect- 
ing the mothers to be of the coming genera- 
tion, so that the child may have its elemen- 
tary right of being born well? Is it setting 
apart any of its ablest men, trained not only 
in theology, but in the study of human nature, 
normal and abnormal, in order that these 
may bring to bear upon the individual crimi- 
nal the resources at once of religion and 
science? Some of these questions sound bit- 
terly ironical. 

310 



RELIGION IN SOCIETY 

" Crime," it has been well said, "is not 
so much a penal as a social question." It is 
the symptom of social disease. To a very- 
great extent it springs out of social in- 
equalities, poverty, degraded surroundings, 
lack of moral, mental, or physical education. 
The psychiatrist tells us that crime often 
depends on physiological accidents. A slight 
injury to the brain, or the use of narcotic 
drugs, or the addiction to alcohol, may radi- 
cally change a man's character and trans- 
form a respectable and worthy citizen into 
a flagrant transgressor of law, human and 
divine. Doubtless the sociological and medi- 
cal theories of crime are partially true. But, 
after all, it is neither man's environment 
nor his brain that is the central element of 
the problem, but the man himself. It is true 
that there are many men in prison who 
ought never to have been sent there, off- 
spring as they are of parents steeped in 
drink and immorality, and educated, as they 
have been, in the gutter, with not even the 

311 



THE MODERN MIND 

care that we bestow upon our domestic ani- 
mals. Why should there not be moral asy- 
lums for these, just as there are asylums for 
the mentally diseased? In proportion as the 
causes of crime are studied and seen to be 
largely beyond the control of the criminal, 
in this proportion will the thought of retri- 
bution die out of the public mind, and in its 
place will come the thought of our social 
responsibilities for the wrong-doer, and of 
the best means to be employed for his cure 
and restoration to normal life. It is to be 
acknowledged that during the past few 
decades great reforms have been achieved— 
the segregation of the young, the sympa- 
thetic treatment of first offenders, the devel- 
opment of the probation system, and the new 
Borstal method employed in England, in 
which good diet, hard work at a useful trade, 
and rigid discipline, are the main factors — 
all these are most valuable and will bear 
good fruit; and doubtless the Christian 
spirit played no small part in bringing these 

312 



RELIGION IN SOCIETY 

reforms about. Nevertheless, the Church 
has not been the leader in this work of re- 
form, though it has approved the work when 
once it was done. At the present time in 
England there are beneficent changes for the 
good of the prison population under the con- 
sideration of the Government; but the im- 
pulse was received, not from the Church, 
but from the stage. John Galsworthy's 
famous play, Justice, has given the death- 
blow to English prison conservatism. 

Here, then, is the first duty which 
organised Christianity owes to the criminal. 
It must understand him and the forces 
that have made him, and it must so 
leaven the State with its own idealism 
that the only pain that should be inflicted is 
the pain necessarily involved in a change of 
character. But the Church owes much more 
than this. It must make religion a reality 
in the life of the prisoner; and to do this 
effectively the men who represent religion 
to the prisoner should be especially trained 

313 



THE MODERN MIND 

for that purpose. We need not underrate 
the value of emotional evangelism. Never- 
theless, it has serious limitations. The 
prison needs an evangelism which does not 
merely provoke feeling, but which takes a 
calm and sane view of the facts and knows 
that moral defects and bad habits must be 
overcome by special methods. It is a pa- 
thetic fact that many criminals do not love 
crime for its own sake, are profoundly mis- 
erable, and think that in religion there is 
help for them if only they could find it. Is 
the Church supplying this help? Let me 
answer by quoting some words from a book 
widely read and appreciated at the present 
time. Speaking of a London burglar, the 
writer says: 

" Never once — and in this all the prisoners I 
have ever talked to bear him out — never once did 
a prison chaplain visit his cell, make an appeal 
to his higher nature, or show that interest in his 
life, whether he swam or sank, which an expert 
like General Booth tells us is the very first step 
towards the reclamation of the outcast. I asked 

314 



RELIGION IN SOCIETY 

him his opinion of the Church services, and he 
said that they were regarded as opportunities for 
conversation, that the words of the prayers sounded 
like mockery, that singing hymns was pleasing and 
popular, that the sermons were unintelligible. In 
the interview which a prisoner is supposed to have 
with the chaplain before release, he was addressed 
always in the same words (others bear him out 
in this, too) : ' Well, I suppose I shall see you back 
here in a month or two? ' Once he turned round 
on the chaplain and said: c Yes, and it won't be 
your fault if you don't see me back here all my 
life.' He was conscious that the chaplain ought 
to have been able to help him. A strange convic- 
tion in the mind of such a man. ' ' x 

It would seem that where organised Chris- 
tianity fails to-day in its relation to the 
criminal is not that it is doing nothing, 
though that is probably true of some prisons, 
but rather that what it does is done in a hap- 
hazard, unscientific way. It lacks precision 
and definiteness of aim. It is wanting in a 
just and serious appreciation of the problem. 
Religion, we know, can do for the criminal 
what nothing else can, if only it is brought 
to bear upon him in the right way. Mean- 

1 Harold Begbie: Twice Bom Men, p. 128. 
315 



THE MODERN MIND 

time, thousands of souls are allowed to sink 
down into darkness, lives are broken on the 
wheel of pain and misery, and society is suf- 
fering from a sore that festers and will not 
heal. 

So far I have spoken of the Church's rela- 
tion to those within the direct range of her 
influence. But what about the great mass 
that refuse the Church's ministry, while at 
the same time by no means hostile to the 
spiritual interests for which the Church 
stands? This is one of the saddest and most 
perplexing phenomena of our time. The 
Catholic Church is at deadly war with the 
whole body of socialistic reformers; yet 
among these latter are some of the most ar- 
dent and religious spirits of the century. The 
Protestant churches are quietly losing their 
hold upon great numbers of excellent people 
and then fall into the mistake of supposing 
that non-churchgoing necessarily means ir- 
religion. As a matter of fact, there are thou- 
sands who believe in God and pray to Him, 

316 



RELIGION IN SOCIETY 

who cherish the hope of a future life, who 
honour the Lord Jesus, and yet are not at 
home in any of our Church organisations 
and find in various substitutes the inspira- 
tion of fellowship and worship. That the 
Church is suffering by the loss of so much 
valuable moral and spiritual strength, and 
that these who have broken with its tradi- 
tions are suffering through their divorce 
from the spiritual resources of an historical 
communion, goes without saying. But what 
bridge can be built to span the chasm? It 
may be that the Church will be constrained 
to modify some of her methods so as to suit 
the needs of the new age, throwing into the 
background the things that offend, and em- 
phasising more and more the things that at- 
tract. But the true solution of the difficulty 
will be found when the Church, inspired by 
the vision of the Eternal, once more receives 
a fresh baptism of power, and stands forth 
as the friend and helper of humanity, as the 
defender of the weak, the poor, and the op- 

317 



THE MODERN MIND 

pressed, as the leader in the service of man, 
which is also the service of God. The spec- 
tacle of such a Church will fling its spell on 
every generous spirit. Men will press into 
its ranks with enthusiasm, and the Kingdom 
of God on earth will once more " suffer vio- 
lence and the violent will take it by force." 



318 



CHAPTER XI 

THE NEW CONCEPTION OF MISSIONS 

If from one point of view Christianity is the 
absolute religion, nay, is religion in its pur- 
est essence, from another point of view it is 
one among many religions. Hence, we are 
concerned with the missionary problem. 
Why should we seek to substitute Chris- 
tianity for the native religions of distant 
lands? What is our message, and what 
guarantee have we that it will find accept- 
ance? Are there any grounds for encourag- 
ing the hope that the religion of humanity 
will yet be one, and that that one will be the 
religion of Christ? 

Our fathers had a short and easy way of 
explaining the older religions. They said: 
" These faiths are false, inspired by the 
Enemy of souls, who by subtle artifice seeks 
to lead men astray, and, under one disguise 

319 



THE MODERN MIND 

and another, gain their service and wor- 
ship." But now we can no longer say so. 
The doctrine of evolution has here, as else- 
where, revolutionised our ideas. We now see 
that not only this or that religion develops, 
but that religion itself has grown, has passed 
through various well-marked stages towards 
the highest and fairest forms. All religions, 
from the lowest Animism or spirit worship, 
up to the loftiest ethical theism, are geneti- 
cally related. "We may say that without the 
earlier stages the later could not be. Viewed 
from the outside, the religious history of man 
stretches like a trackless jungle of false 
sanctities and consecrated falsities, of super- 
stitious credulities and grotesque imagin- 
ings; viewed from within, it has been the 
history of a spirit bewildered amid the mys- 
teries of the universe, yet possessed with an 
imperious craving to seek after God, if haply 
He might be found. Even in its most de- 
praved form religion has meant good to man, 
has helped him to bear the sorrows of life, 

320 



CONCEPTION OF MISSIONS 

and to face the last agony of death. Bad 
and miserable as this world has been, with 
its multitudinous creeds, what kind of a 
world had it been without faith or the aspira- 
tions and inspirations that faith creates? If 
the Christian religion, then, is, as we believe 
it is, the answer to the age-long quest of hu- 
manity, those who have heard its message 
are debtors to the peoples still without it. 
This is the deepest, as it is the most human 
ground, on which the cause of missions rests. 
Christianity is pledged by its very nature to 
missionary enterprise. The truths it pro- 
claims, the consolations and the hopes it 
offers are not meant for this or that people 
only; they answer permanent and universal 
needs of the race. 

It is here that we are met with an objec- 
tion which has made the ideal of missions 
seem like a Utopian dream in the eyes of 
some. There are lines of cleavage, we are 
told, running through the human race, re- 
vealed in speech and in some of the bodily or- 

321 



THE MODERN MIND 

gans and in the various forms of social in- 
stitution. How absurdly quixotic to claim 
to overleap all these barriers and to impose 
on the Mongol, the South Sea Islander, the 
Hindu, the negro, and other equally diverse 
races, the religious ideas of the Englishman 
or the American! Is not the missionary en- 
terprise a misguided, however well-motived, 
attempt to thwart the manifest designs of 
nature? Unfortunately for this contention, 
however, modern investigation is more and 
more establishing the underlying unity of the 
race. This unity is one of nature, not nec- 
essarily of origin. Unity of origin is a ques- 
tion for the scientific anthropologist. Unity 
of nature can be discerned by the historian 
and the psychologist. Whether we assume 
that the race has descended from a single 
pair, a theory accepted by many distin- 
guished scientists, like Darwin, Huxley, and 
Wallace, or that there were various centres 
from which man arose, the really important 
question is: Is there an element which is 

322 



CONCEPTION OF MISSIONS 

common to every man and which constitutes 
him a man? is the race a spiritual unity? 
We now know that peoples long supposed to 
be radically unlike are in reality wonderfully 
similar. It used to be said that the Semitic 
race, of which the Arab and the Jew are 
modern representatives, in contrast to the 
Indo-European, was inspired by an instinc- 
tive belief in one God. We now know that 
the Semites at a very early time believed in 
many gods. Nor do differences in language 
argue differences in racial stock. What two 
languages are more unlike than Hindustani 
and English? Yet many ages past the fathers 
of Hindu India and the fathers of modern 
England were brothers, lived under the same 
heavens, cultivated the same soil, and wor- 
shipped the same deities. And students of 
primitive man tell us that New Zealanders 
are weaving mats to-day in the same pat- 
terns as are found in the fragments which 
have been discovered on the sites of the an- 
cient Lake-Dwellers of Switzerland. Man, 

323 



THE MODERN MIND 

then, is spiritually one. Why should not his 
religion be one, under whatever varieties of 
form? Moreover, what is this American 
Christianity which, as the objection contends, 
the Eastern peoples are unable to assimilate? 
It is not American at all, but comes from 
Judaea. Eising in the East, it has conquered 
the West, and now would re-enter and pos- 
sess a larger East. 

There are some, indeed, who think that 
Christianity is an excellent gift for sav- 
ages, as a means of raising them out 
of their delusions, but that to seek to 
impose it on the cultivated minds of the 
Orient is a trifle ridiculous and even imperti- 
nent. This is an argument which influences 
even members of the Christian Church. The 
Oriental peoples have their sacred books and 
religions suited to their national character- 
istics: why constrain them to accept a for- 
eign faith that has no roots in their national 
past? There is a twofold answer: one from 
the non-Christian and the other from the 

324 



CONCEPTION OF MISSIONS 

Christian standpoint. Said a distinguished 
American citizen recently to an equally dis- 
tinguished subject of the Mikado: " Why do 
you allow these missionaries to enter Japan 
and keep the people stirred up? You have 
your own religions, ancient and venerable; 
why is it necessary to make the people rest- 
less with a new religion? " The true spirit 
of modern Japan was revealed in the answer : 
<< We have opened the ports of our country 
to all that is best in civilisation, to the mar- 
kets of other countries,' to their literature, 
and to the armaments of war. If there is 
any best in religion, why should we close our 
ports to it when they are open to everything 
else the world has to give us? And if the 
Christian religion is the best, why should 
not the people of Japan have the advantage 
of it? " From the Christian standpoint the 
answer cuts more deeply. If the Gospel is 
not a message for all men, it is a message 
for no man. If the Buddhist priest, the 
Brahmanical pundit, the Japanese scholar, 

325 



THE MODERN MIND 

cannot receive the Christian Gospel, then its 
claims are at an end; for it professes to 
speak to man as man, to the larger humanity 
in which all men share. In its essence it 
is a spiritual light thrown upon heart and 
conscience, revealing to man the divine side 
of his nature, his kinship with the Eternal; 
in a word, it is the grandest manifestation 
of the Light that lighteth every man. This 
"Word of God is meant for all His children, 
and when they hear His voice they will 
obey. 

But concrete proof is better than abstract 
argument. We are witnessing to-day the 
amazing spectacle of a nation in search of 
a religion. In Japan, Shintoism, the ancient 
faith, is little more than a State ceremonial. 
No educated man regards it with any other 
feeling than that of formal respect, as an 
ancient national institution. It is felt to be- 
long to a primitive mode of thought. Bud- 
dhism, the religion which appeals to the cul- 
tivated Japanese, has fallen into decay, and 

326 



CONCEPTION OF MISSIONS 

its educated adherents are beginning to real- 
ise that if it is to be saved it must be through 
contact with the Christian spirit. Here are 
some remarkable words written by the Pro- 
fessor of the Philosophy of Religion in the 
Imperial University of Japan. " We Bud- 
dhists are ready to accept Christianity. Nay, 
more, our faith in Buddha is faith in Christ. 
The one has come to us in order to release 
us from the fetters of passion and avarice 
and to convince us of an ideal higher than 
any worldly good. His Gospel was that of 
resignation attainable by meditation, yet 
never leaving one to the dreamy quietism of 
a pantheistic or nihilistic philosophy, but 
purifying human activity by calm enlighten- 
ment, and pushing one to the love of all 
things by faith in an incarnate Dharma. The 
other appeared in flesh as Son of Man, to 
redeem us from sin, to recover us to the 
love of our Father, from a covetous attach- 
ment to our own egotism. His Gospel was 
that of love and hope, but never of fury and 

327 



THE MODERN MIND 

vanity. He preached no wisdom, but the 
wisdom of His believers is holy and leading 
to the Father, purified by faith and strength- 
ened by hope. ' ' * We are justified in saying, 
then, that in the world up to date there are 
only two religions possible to cultivated men 
— Christianity and Buddhism. Which of 
these is best fitted to be the world religion? 
The answer must be, — That one which best 
assimilates whatever is good in its rival. 
Christianity, we say, is the perfect religion. 
But an element in its very perfection is its 
capacity to enter into alliance with all that 
is good and truly human, from whatever 
source it may come. Christianity will win 
the world just in proportion as it refuses to 
stand over against all other religions, in 
proud exclusiveness, but rather sympathises 
with every pure utterance of the human 
spirit and claims it as its own. 

Japan is the strategic point in modern mis- 
sionary endeavour. To win her is to win 

1 M. Anesaki: Eiboert Journal, October, 1905, p. 10. 

328 



CONCEPTION OF MISSIONS 

throughout the Orient. At the present mo- 
ment the Christians of Japan are a mere 
handful— 120,000— in a population of 47,000,- 
000. Yet most thoughtful observers are 
agreed that this is the leaven that will leaven 
the whole lump. For it is in closest contact 
with the new Japan that is emerging out of 
the ruins of the old, the new Japan whose 
great ambition it is to be one of the first- 
class Powers of the world. Now, the nominal 
religion of all the first-class Powers is Chris- 
tianity. This religion creates the psycho- 
logical atmosphere that is the medium 
through which these nations can understand 
each other, and can to some extent divine 
each other's action. Apart from deeper con- 
victions, Japan will find it an advantage to 
adopt Christianity as a means of moral com- 
munication with the other great Powers, 
though at the same time she may retain her 
primitive rites, on account of their national 
associations and their sentimental attrac- 
tion. Even so, the Christian may well re- 

329 



THE MODERN MIND 

joice. The seeds of Christ's idealism, though 
sown in a soil of secular utilitarianism, will 
rise to vital power and commanding energy 
in many a susceptible soul. With a Chris- 
tianised Japan as the great missionary cen- 
tre of the East, the world is on the way to 
a universal faith. Meantime, the task laid 
on the Christian Church in Japan is clear. 
It is to create a theistic consciousness in the 
native mind, a belief in a living God worthy 
of the soul's highest homage, and in the soul 
by right immortal. Out of this theism will 
spring a higher ethic than that on which 
Japan has founded her national life. A 
young man, born of mingled American and 
Japanese strain, aware of the traditions of 
both great nations, from which he took his 
descent, said to a leading American who had 
spoken in praise of Bushido: " Bushido? I 
know you admire it in the West, but you do 
not seem to understand that there is nothing 
in Bushido which makes it necessary that a 
man should be truthful to men or true to a 

330 



CONCEPTION OF MISSIONS 

woman." 1 The Japanese are a shrewd and 
far-sighted people. They will not rest con- 
tent with a doctrine of despair, with an en- 
lightenment that leads to eternal uncon- 
sciousness as the highest goal of humanity. 
Nor will they stake their national fortunes 
on a morality which has nothing to say to 
the deepest and most sacred issues of the 
personal life. 

The cause of missions has entered on a 
new era in our time. The missionary spirit 
of to-day is distinguished from that of an 
earlier age by its wider sympathies, its 
deeper human note, its mightier ambitions, 
its nearer approximation to the thought and 
purpose of Christ. The most signal mani- 
festation of the new spirit is to be seen in 
the Laymen's Missionary Movement, a move- 
ment without a parallel in the history of the 
Church. One fact alone speaks eloquently 
of the forces at work in this outburst of 
Christian devotion. Throughout the United 

1 Talcott Williams: Men and Missions, pp. 9, 10. 

331 



THE MODERN MIND 

States, during the winter of 1909-1910, in all 
the leading towns, seventy-five major and 
minor conventions, limited to men, have been 
held, under the guidance, not of clergymen, 
but of leading business and professional men. 
These conventions culminated in the great 
National Congress of Missions held in Chi- 
cago. No less than sixty-five thousand, rep- 
resenting the brain and moral backbone of 
the country, attended these meetings and 
took a breathless interest in the problems un- 
der discussion. For the first time in the his- 
tory of missions, great numbers of wise and 
thoughtful men are consecrating to the prob- 
lem of world-evangelisation a share of the 
restless energy, the constructive skill, the 
statesmanlike grasp of intellect, which they 
have devoted to the great commercial enter- 
prises that have made America one of the 
first nations of the earth. This movement we 
owe to the spiritual intuition of a young 
business man, who was inspired by the 
vision of three thousand students assembled 

332 



CONCEPTION OF MISSIONS 

to discuss and pray about the work of 
missions. 

But this movement is greater and springs 
out of causes deeper than even some of its 
leaders suspect. For one thing, it expresses 
the growing sympathy of our age, the sense 
of brotherhood that assumes obligations in 
the spirit of love. We no longer seek to make 
converts in a sectarian spirit, as though we 
had a monopoly of truth and faith. Eather 
would we find Christ everywhere. We wel- 
come every noble line in the Vedas or the 
Avesta, and catch echoes of Christian 
thought in the laws of Confucius and in the 
doctrines of Buddha. The Christian convic- 
tion to-day is that God has not left Himself 
anywhere without a witness, and that men 
who have struggled to find God, and in a 
measure have found Him, have a right to 
rejoice in His supreme revelation of Himself 
in Jesus Christ. Our fathers believed that 
countless myriads of heathen were perishing 
for lack of the Gospel; and this terrible 

333 



THE MODERN MIND 

thought wrought deeds of sacrifice worthy of 
the age of martyrs and apostles. But no- 
body can accept this motive to-day. A nobler 
theology has undermined it and has substi- 
tuted for it a diviner incentive — personal de- 
votion to the Lord Jesus, profound belief 
that the future of humanity is bound up with 
the fate of the Gospel. Thoughtful men are 
becoming more and more convinced that it is 
religion which alone can support the abound- 
ing energies of modern civilisation, and that 
the more complicated the civilisation the more 
optimistic and the truer to reality must be 
the religion. Now, there is only one religion 
which rests on optimism, on a belief in the 
omnipotence of goodness. It is the religion 
of Christ. Only this religion encourages 
action and enterprise, builds up a healthy 
social order, and holds out some worthy hope 
for the future. ' ' Why is it, ' ' says a Japa- 
nese writer, ' ' that heathen in general go into 
decay so soon, but Christians in general know 
no decay whatever, but hope even in death 

334 



CONCEPTION OF MISSIONS 

itself. ... I attribute the progressiveness 
of Christendom to its Christianity. Faith, 
Hope, and Charity, the three life-angels that 
defy and shun Death and his angels have 
worked upon it for the past nineteen hundred 
years, and have made it as we have it now. 
• . . Enormous yet though their sins are, 
these people have the power to overcome 
them. They have yet no sorrows which they 
think they cannot heal. Is not Christianity 
worth having if but for this power alone ? " * 
And to the objection, Why send missionaries 
to heathen when there are so many heathen 
at home ? the same writer replies : l i This 
world is a unit, and the human race is one 
great family. An idea of a perfect Christen- 
dom in the midst of encircling heathenism is 
impossible. In Christianising other peoples 
you Christianise yourself." 2 

Finally, the new missionary enthusiasm 
differs from the old in that it is character- 

1 Kanzo Uchimura: Diary of a Japanese Convert, pp. 200, 
201. *Ibid., p. 203. 

335 



THE MODERN MIND 

ised by a mightier ambition. The older aimed 
at plucking here and there a few souls, like 
brands from the burning; the newer speaks 
not of individuals, but of nations. Its pur- 
pose is not to turn Chinese or Hindus or 
Japanese into American or English Chris- 
tians, not to impose our Western Christian- 
ity upon the Oriental mind, but rather to 
form Christ in the national consciousness, 
that He may there take on a new form and 
reveal Himself in unsuspected proportions. 
We may well believe that there are aspects 
of Christ's person and work which the West- 
ern genius has been unable to appreciate. 
Christ, according to the flesh, was an Orien- 
tal. In returning to His world, may it not 
be that even the Christian world of the West 
will catch a new vision of Him, will see Him 
freed from the trammels and swaddling- 
clothes of an artificial and Latinised the- 
ology? The heart of the Christian may well 
feel a thrill of joy when he thinks of the 
wonderful triumphs which may in our own 

336 



CONCEPTION OF MISSIONS 

day bring fresh honour to that Name ' ' which 
is above every name; that in the Name of 
Jesus every knee should bow, of things 
in heaven and things on earth and things 
under the earth, and that every tongue should 
confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory 
of God the Father." 1 

1 Philippians ii, 9-11 (Am.E.V.). 



337 



INDEX 



Ackermann, L., 230 
iEschylus, 148 
Agnostic, 25 
Agnosticism, 26 
Anderson, Sir Robert, 306 
Anesaki, M., 328 
Annihilation, 262 
Anglican, 6 
Antipas, 54 
Arnold, Matthew, 25, 73, 

126, 190 
Arnold, Sir Edwin, 173 
Anthropology, 226 
Anthropomorphism, 162 
Augustus, 50 

Bacon, B. W., 69 

Balzac, 237 

Barry, W., 150 

Baxter, 285 

Beccaria, Marquis, 301-04 

Begbie, Harold, 178, 315 

Bible, 9 

Bible, inspiration of, 24 

Biology, 227 

Bismarck, 188 

Booth, Gen., 314 

Boutroux, E., 225 

Bradford, A. H., 260 

Bradley, F. H., 229 

Brain, 238 

Brooks, Phillips, 285 

Bruce, 30 

Buddha, 149 

Buddhism, 102, 149, 172, 

173, 326, 328 
Burkitt, Prof., 30, 112 



Bushido, 330 
Butler, Bp., 7 

Caiaphas, 83-84 
Caird, E., 97 
Calvary, 24 
Carlyle, 4, 253, 257 
Celsus, 65 
Channing, 285 
Character, 239 
Christ as the centre of 
Christianity, 116-118 

as an authority in 

religion, 8 

as a physician, 64, 

73, 75 

as a teacher, 41 

, his attitude to mir- 
acles, 132-134 

-, his death, 110-111 



, his message to the 

poor, 288-95 
and immortali ty, 

267, 273 

, his optimism, 169 

, the revealer of God, 

109 

— , the Son of God, 103-5 
-, the source of Chris- 



tian theology, 32-34 
-, his suffering, a 



redeeming power, 164, 

166, 167 
, what we know 

about Him, 53 
Christian religion, 91 
Christian Science, 155, 156, 

174 



339 



INDEX 



Christian unity, 25 
Christianity, 12, 90, 92, 

114, 116, and morality, 

114-116, its progressive- 

ness, 333, 334 
Chrysostom, 285 
Church, the, 114, 189, 294 
Church, its message to 

the criminal, 300-316 
Church, its message to the 

sick, 295-300 
Coleridge, 187 
Collins, 10 

Comte, Auguste, 232 
Conscience, 258 
Creed, Apostles', 17 
Criticism, 29 

Crucifixion of Christ, 85-88 
Cults, 20 



Darwin, 322 
Death, 236 
Deity, 28 

Demons, expulsion of, 137 
Demoniac of Gerasa, 72 
Dharma, 327 

Dissociation of personal- 
ity, 72 
Divinity, 29 
Dogma, 17-25 
Du Bose, 98 
Duhring, 240 



Edwards, 285 
Eliot, C. W., 92 
Ellis, Havelock, 305 
Emerson, 4, 11, 257 
Ethics, 114-116 
Eucken, 257 
Evangelical, 6 
Evolution, 319-20 
Evangelism, Ind. xvi 
Evil, 148-165 



Evolution, 28 
Evolution, spiritual, 192 

Faith, 37, 137 

Fall of man, 24 

Ferri, 305 

Flechsig, P., 240 

Foster, 97 

Fourth Gospel, 101 

Francis (of Assisi), 185 

Galsworthy, John, 313 

Genesis, 23 

German humanism, 257 

Gissing, Geo., 262 

Gladstone, 188 

God the Father, 14, 15, 33, 

34, 56 
God's conflict with evil, 

160 
Goethe, 27, 48, 186, 257 
Gordon, G. A., 134 
Gordon, Gen., 188 
Gospel, 2, 14, 31, 55, 325-7 
Gospels, earliest sources 

of the, 42-47 
Gould, E. P., 69 

Haeckel, 27, 28, 224, 225, 

228, 240 
Hardy, T. J., 150 
Harnack, 14, 30, 46, 97, 128, 

132, 165, 278 
Healing, 55, 138, 139 
Hegel, 18, 177 
Hermann, 205 
Holtzmann, H. J., 30 
Holy Spirit, 61 
Howard, John, 303 
Hugo, Victor, 237 
Hume, 121-122 
Hutton, K. H., 19 
Huxley, 65, 121, 136, 251, 

322 



340 



INDEX 



Idealism, 232 

Immortality, 223 

Immortality and the res- 
urrection, 273-80 

Immortality an ethical 
demand, 266 

Inaudi, Jacques, 249 

Incarnation, 12 

Inge, E. W., 221 

Intuition, 6 

James, Wm, 176, 187, 247, 

299 
Janet, Pierre, 71-72 
Japan, the strategic point 

in missions, 329, 331 
Jesus, see Christ 
John the Baptist, 51, 53, 

54, 129 
Josephus, 52 
Jowett, 179 
Judaism, 96 

Julian of Norwich, 220 
Jiilicher, 30 

Kant, 18, 199, 225, 258 

Karma, 172 

Keim, Theodor, 30, 49, 131 

King, President, 286 

Kingdom of God, 62 

Knox, G. W., 23 

Koch, 156 

Ladd, 182 

Last Supper, 82 

Law, William, 217 

Laymen's missionary 

movement, 331 
Learning, 188 
Le Conte, 125 
Lombroso, 305 
Lotze, 144, 151 
Love, 59, 115, 151, 164, 264 
Luther, 185, 195 



Mammon, 60 

Man, 26, 116 

Man, true nature of, 251-9 

Martineau, 2, 180, 181, 184 

Materialism, 27 

Mediumship, 245 

Melancthon, 185 

Menzies, A., 69 

Messiah, 52, 53, 54 

Metchnikoff, 249, 250 

Mill, J. S., 243 

Milton, 58 

Mind, 238 

Miracle, 31, 119, 123, 124 

Missions, argument for, 

325, 326 

Missions, national con- 
gress of, 332 
Missions, objection to, 321, 

326, 331, 333 

Missionary, 91-94 

Modern preaching, weak- 
ness of, 285-6 

Modernist, Ind. xv, 97 
Mohammedanism, 174 
Montefiore, C. G., 69 
Moral nature, 26 
Myconius, 185 
Myers, F. W. H., 176, 246 
Mystic, 36 



Narcotic, 238-239 
Nature, 158 
Nature, laws of, 183 
Nature, miracle, 141, 143, 

146 
Naumann, 97 
Neumann, Arno, 48 
Neurasthenia, 219 
New Testament, 41, 98, 

101, 146 
New theology, 22 
Newman, 1, 19 
Nirvana, 149 



341 



INDEX 



Osier, Prof., 232 
Ostwald, C, 228 

Pain, 149, 155 
Paradise, F. I., 295 
Paulsen, 15, 229 
Peabody, F. G., 295 
Personality, 254-5 
Pharisee, 60, 77 
Philanthropy, 13 
Philosophy, 15 
Philpotts, Eden, 153 
Podmore, F., 245 
Positivism, 232 
Poverty and Christianity, 

292-3 
Powell, Lyman, 297 
Pragmatism, Ind. xv, 177 
Prayer, 170, 177, 197, 222 
Prayer, answers to, 208 
Prayer, effectual, 216 
Prayer, false, 213 
Prayer for the sick, 218 
Prayer, purification of, 193 
Prayer, subject to law, 192 
Preaching and the aims 

of Christ, 282-3 
Preaching, favourable 

conditions of, 284-5 
Prince, Morton, 70 
Prison reform, 306-08 
Protestant, 97 
Protestantism, 94 
Psychasthenia, 154 
Psychical research, Ind. xv 
Psychical research and 

immortality, 244 
Psychology, 184, 227, 238 
Puritanism, 94 

Rationalism, 123 
Rauschenbush, W., 295 
Reason, 20 
Re-education, 76 
Reformation, 9 



Relaxation, 219 
Religion, 18, 100, 179, 320 
Religion, its contribution 

to life, 282 
Religion of the future, 118 
Religion, the reality of, 

281-2 
Religious unrest, 119-20 
Renan, 96 
Resurrection, 86, 88, 113, 

276 
Revelation, 19 
Revival of religion, 234-6 
Robertson, F. W., 180, 297 
Robinson, Forbes, 195, 196 
Roman Catholic, 6 
Rothe, 210 
Royce, 162 



Sabatier, Auguste, 17, 132 
•Sabbath, 77 
Sanday, 30, 141 
Scepticism, 150 
Schleiermacher, 16, 30, 180 
Schiller, F. C. S., 11 
Schopenhauer, 149 
Schweitzer, A., 112, 141, 

270 
Science, 27, 224, 244 
Shakespeare, 148 
Shintoism, 326 
Sin, 24, 59, 73, 74 
Sin, original, 24 
Sin, unpardonable, 61 
Smith, Helene, 187 
Socialism, Ind. xv 
Socialist, 63 
Socrates, Ind. xiv, 52 
Soul, 26 

Spiritual Healing, Ind. xv 
Stanton, 30 

Stephen, Sir Leslie, 150 
St. Paul, 105 
Strauss, 30, 69, 70, 126 



342 



INDEX 



Suffering, 111, 148 
Suggestion, 75 
Suicide, 231, 260 
Suicide, and immortality, 
231 

Telepathy, 218 
Temptation, 53 
Theology, 7, 11, 18, 20, 21, 

32, 33 
Thought-transference, 245 
Tiberius, 50 
Tindal, 10 
Toland, 10 
Tolstoi, 96, 268 
Truth, 7, 11, 126 
Tyrrell, 98, 115 



Uchimura, K, 335 

Wallace, 322 

Weather, prayers for the, 

183 
Weinel, H., 41 
Weiss, Johannes, 30, 69 
Wellhausen, J., 69 
Wernle, 139 
Westcott, 30 
Wilde, Oscar, 154 
Williams, Talcott, 331 
Wobbermin, 90 
Work as a therapeutic 

agent, 75 

Zola, 230 



DEC 19 18, ° 



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